


The Blood of the Hentzaus

by El Staplador (elstaplador)



Series: Daughters of Ruritania [1]
Category: Zenda Novels - Anthony Hope
Genre: 1890s, 1900s, Bechdel Test Pass, Boarding School, Courtly Love, Crossover, Duelling, F/F, Fear of Heights, Femslash, Gen, I mean it when I say 'major character death', I trust you are aware that first-cousin relationships are canonical, Internalised Homophobia, Marriage of Convenience, Mugging, Murder, Next Generation, Original Female Characters - Freeform, Pillow Talk, Politics, Post-Canon, Socialism, Special Friends, Suspicious death, Telegrams, Victorian attitudes to pregnancy, bachelor weekends, convoluted plots, cross-class relationship, cross-dressing, fin de siecle, gratuitous references to assorted other Ruritanian romances, heredity, illness suffered by child, non-consensual imbibing of unspecified drugs, opera - Freeform, ruritania, schoolgirl pranks, senseless but not very graphic violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-11
Updated: 2012-11-14
Packaged: 2017-11-09 15:58:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 20
Words: 44,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/457304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/pseuds/El%20Staplador
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1891. It is sixteen years since Mr Rassendyll first set foot in Ruritania, and thirteen since the events described in <i>Rupert of Hentzau</i>. It is twelve years since Queen Flavia was crowned monarch of Ruritania in her own right. Elisabeth, beloved only daughter of Fritz and Helga von Tarlenheim, is growing up in a peaceful and prosperous country. In Ruritania, however, one can only be sure of two things: that the Hentzaus fear nothing, and that, if there is a plot, the Tarlenheims are in it up to the neck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. An Education Outside the Tarlenheim Household

**Author's Note:**

> This assumes that the reader is familiar with _The Prisoner of Zenda_ , and has either read or doesn't mind being spoiled for _Rupert of Hentzau_. I _think_ it can probably be followed without either, however.
> 
> This was started for the Femmeslash Big Bang, which sank without trace some time in 2011. If you're at all interested in creating art to go with this story, I'd be delighted to hear from you!

My father was often heard to remark to my mother and brothers, though not, as he thought, to me, that he was bound to thank a merciful heaven that that young rogue Rupert of Hentzau had departed this world before he – my father, that is, the Count Fritz von Tarlenheim – had been so foolish as to bring a daughter into it.

I wonder occasionally what Papa made of Maria Adler. He never, I think, trusted her, from our schooldays onwards, though whether he tumbled to the secret of her parenthood I cannot say.

I wonder, too, what Maria Adler made of me. A challenge, or a comrade? A tool, or a friend? Or, perhaps, simply a diversion. Still, the question presses to the front of my mind: why me? What to her was the appeal of Elisabeth Flavia Luise Hedwig von Tarlenheim? I would almost swear that she loved me at one time, or perhaps always.

Then I laugh.

And what I made of her? My friend (though whether you will still call me 'friend' when you have reached the end I do not know), this is what I shall endeavour to tell in these pages, but until I have laid this history fully before you, let it suffice that you know that the years I spent in her company are, for good or ill, the years that rise most vividly to my memory now.

 

To start a story at the end, or in the middle, has always been one of my faults. Let me attempt to mend this particular occasion. For me, then, it all began when I attained the lofty age of ten years and was sent away to school in the Hauptwald, and if the need arises to tell you of anything that came before, I shall tell you when the occasion arises, and as little as possible, for I always found ancient history most indigestible.

I went to school, I say, by the reluctant agreement of my parents and myself. It was then becoming fashionable for Ruritanian girls to be educated outside the home, and my mother feared that I was running wild with only my brothers for company.

Heinrich, Leopold and Karl were better company, I maintain, than most of the girls at school (save one, whom I shall come to shortly), and I do not know that they were entirely to blame for my wildness. In all events, I ran as wild there as I had at home. I was not unhappy, as some girls were, but I found it dreadfully dull. I believe that I was quick to learn, and grew bored waiting for the others to catch up; certainly I recall interminable lessons where the nuns explained the blindingly obvious in excruciating detail, whose tedium was punctuated only by the screech of chalk. I learned to occupy myself in building ever more elaborate contraptions for the confusion of the sisters, and the amusement of my classmates.

So far as I was concerned, this life of tedium and timetables came to an end in the autumn of 1891, when an American lady by the name of Mrs Norton deposited her only niece Maria Adler into the tender care of the Reverend Mother. The timetables continued, but I paid little heed to them. Something interesting enough to occupy my whole attention had at last come into the school. And this was how she came:

It was, I have said, autumn. The leaves were falling, and the big oak tree in the garden revealed the structure of its branches in a most fascinating manner.

'I could climb that,' I said one Saturday after luncheon.

'Bet you couldn't,' Julia Czechenyi retorted, and that was enough to spur my adventurous soul. Despite the rain, despite the rising wind, I was out in the garden in a flash.

The first ten feet of a tree are always the most difficult. This one, fortunately, had a low branch that dipped down to the level of my shoulders. It creaked alarmingly as I swung myself up onto it, but held firm. Water dripped from the remaining leaves and ran down the back of my neck. I worked my way up towards the trunk until I was standing on the socket of the branch.

I looked back towards the house. Quite a crowd had gathered around the library window. My classmates Malgorzata, Julia, Sophia, Theresa, and more behind them whose faces I was unable to make out.

'Go on, Elisabeth...' Some gibe floated across the lawn. '...scared...'

I was not scared, and they knew it. I gritted my teeth and managed the next fifteen feet with no trouble beyond a torn petticoat. I looked up. There were still some big branches above me. I looked back. The girls were still urging me upwards. I carried on.

Up and up. Leaves fluttered around me, past me, blown by the November wind. When at last I could go no further, I looked again at the library window. Now they looked scared; they gestured for me to come down.

I looked at the ground, and I could not move. The tree swung in the heightening breeze. I felt a little sick, and very scared. I clung to the branch.

'Come down!' they cried. 'Reverend Mother!'

Had there been a hundred Reverend Mothers on the way I could not have come down. There was no chance now of getting back inside before someone saw me, and the fear that held me captive held more authority than that of authority itself. I moaned, and looked up. Moody clouds hurried across the darkening sky. I was soaked and filthy.

'Elisabeth...!' Someone was calling to me from below. I risked a glance downwards. Sister Paulina, with a ladder. I shuddered and clung tighter to my branch.

'Stay exactly where you are,' she called and (I believe, for I dared not look) began to set the ladder against the trunk. But a gust of wind caught and tugged at my skirt, so that I lurched. The branch broke beneath me with a sharp crack, and I fell.

I must have been stunned when I hit the ground, and when I opened my eyes I found myself under the tree, my treacherous branch beside me, and a throbbing ache in my right wrist.

'Nothing broken,' Sister Paulina said after a swift examination. She was, quite unreasonably from my point of view, furious. 'Go and wait outside Reverend Mother's study, and tell her exactly how you came to be in that state.'

My spirit broken, I trailed inside. That was how, when Mrs Norton and her niece Maria Adler arrived at the convent, I came to be dripping on the tiled floor in the corridor outside the study, my dress filthy and my petticoat torn, hair full of leaves, and with a long scratch down one side of my face and a bruise on my forehead.

Reverend Mother ignored me (indeed, what else could she do?) and the lady, occupied in discussing the curriculum with her, did not see me. Her niece saw me, however, and an air of bored sophistication was replaced – for a bare moment – by a glance of interest, as if this place might not, after all, be as dull as she had feared.

For my part, I was smitten that instant by the kind of fervent admiration that occasionally afflicts a small girl when she comes across an older, more glamorous, one. Maria (though I would not know her name until the next day, and would not meet her until I had completed the forty-eight hours in solitary confinement that was the punishment for my escapade) was perhaps two or three years older than me, tall, with a mop of dark curls and a confident set to her head. She moved with a rangy grace, though her skirts seemed to impede her somewhat. (I inspected the tear in my petticoat with disgust. I would no doubt be spending much of the evening mending it.)

Two days on my own, with not only my own mending to do, but three ripped sheets, and, when I had done those, the hateful, hateful embroidery. It was slow work with my wrist aching, and I frequently laid it down and gave way to tears of fury. All of that would have been far more bearable, though, had it not been for my burning curiosity about the new girl.

At last, those tortured two days over, I met Maria Adler. Her parents were both dead, she told us; her father had been an American – the brother of the aunt I had seen – and her mother Ruritanian. She refused to be more specific than this, and we, unwilling to pain an orphan, did not press her. (And indeed, America was a long way away, a place where dynasties were founded in five minutes and into which our own Ruritania might have been fitted thousands of times over. Whoever Maria's mother had been was immaterial; she must surely have turned into someone else the moment she stepped off the ship. America! It invested Maria with a sort of glamour, and, after all, who cared who her mother was? 'It must have been one of the Eschenbauer girls,' my cousin Theresa von Strofzin concluded eventually, and the rest of us, Maria included, came to accept this. It was as likely a story as any; the Eschenbauers were numerous and given to wandering, and the Strofzins were inveterate gossips and generally knew what was what.)

I addressed myself devotedly to securing her attention. Though she was a new girl, and therefore at a disadvantage, she was two years older than me, and therefore had no reason to take an interest in me. She was a bad girl; and might therefore see me either as a potential ally or a potential rival; or she might think me too insignificant to bother with at all. That thought was not to be borne.

 

She had noticed me when I was drenched, filthy and in disgrace. That much I was sure of. But how to repeat the performance without appearing unoriginal? (And, I am ashamed to admit to thinking, how to repeat the performance without having to climb that tree again? The very thought made me feel sick.) Most of the schemes that came to my mind involved climbing. I could, for example, climb out at the landing window at midnight, down the gutter to the floor below, and into the senior dormitory. Maria would be bound to notice me. (So, too, would the prefects, but that worried me but little.) If I had thought I could do it without looking down I would have tried. But no – I was no longer sure of my ability to tackle heights, and to try and fail, or to turn back at the last moment, was unthinkable. It would have to be something else.

The idea came to me one Friday. Small girls are fond of their food, and the insipid fish soup was hardly capable of keeping me from dreaming of beef, potatoes and apple tart. I had not much idea as to what happened in the kitchen, but it seemed likely that it contained more interesting food than was served up to us on fast days. I resolved to investigate.

To resolve was to take action. My opportunity presented itself the very next day, shortly after morning prayers, when Sister Hildegard was taken ill on the way from the chapel to the classroom. Sophia Helsing and I were dispatched to tell Reverend Mother and beseech her to take our lesson. I persuaded Sophia that going round by the kitchens would hardly take any longer than going straight to her study and, indeed, that would have been true had I not taken advantage of the situation and divested the larder of as many choice dainties as I could carry.

Sophia refused to help me carry any of the food (which I considered hypocritical in the extreme, since she was all too happy to share in the spoils later in the day) so I sent her on to Reverend Mother's study while I concealed it in my bed, to the great detriment of my sheets. There it remained through the first lesson of the day, until, Reverend Mother safely out of the way, I swept my classmates upstairs, where we proceeded to devour the lot.

All of it? Nay: one or two of (what were in my ten year old eyes, at least) the most delectable items I wrapped up in a handkerchief and brought to the common room, where I knew Maria would be, along with the other seniors. Boldly I tapped at the door, boldly I walked in, and boldly I presented my idol with a magnificent slice of cold raisin pudding. It was only mildly damaged, and she received it in the spirit in which I intended it – accepted it graciously, expressed her utter lack of intention of sharing it with her classmates, and bestowed upon me a gracious smile and a boiled sweet. I retired well pleased.

Retribution was swift. My raid had deprived no one of her luncheon, but in the process of preparing supper my crime came to light. Consequently, we were made to stand behind our benches and look at our unappetising meals cooling slowly on our plates, until the culprit owned up.

I had, I maintain, always intended to own up, and I considered that it was decidedly unnecessary of Theresa von Strofzin to hiss, far too audibly, to her next-door neighbour, 'It was Elisabeth, you know!'

I glared at her across the table. 'Sneak!' I growled, also too audibly, and suddenly Sister Paulina was at my elbow.

They put me on Friday rations for a week and confined me to the sanatorium for three days. I had expected nothing less, and so bore my punishment with equanimity. Besides, I considered it no punishment at all when, on the first night of my imprisonment, as I lay in bed and looked at the cracks in the ceiling, I heard a gentle tapping at the window.

I sprang out of bed, and saw to my delight that my plan had succeeded beyond my wildest hopes. The face at the window was Maria's. I opened the casement and she slipped inside.

'Whew!' said Maria. 'That was a climb and a half.'

I gazed at her in admiration. 'Did you come up from the herb garden?'

'Well, there's no other way, is there? The ivy's quite solid, really. Here -' she drew a large paper package from her pocket – 'I thought you might be hungry.'

I was. I opened the package and found bread, cheese, a little ham, fruit, and cake. Evidently Maria had made her own raid on the kitchens. I asked, 'Did you look behind the door?'

'No,' she said. 'Why?'

I grinned – cheekily, it may well be said. 'It's worth a look, next time you're down there.'

She laughed. 'I'll bear that in mind. But perhaps, next time, you'd like to show me? I can promise I'll be more efficient than that Helsing kid.'


	2. Partners in Crime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Maria leads Elisabeth into bad ways, and the latter learns a state secret.

So we formed an unholy partnership, Maria and I. Our efforts ranged from mere schoolgirl naughtiness to wholesale destruction. If I had been awkward enough on my own, through sheer boredom, the two of us together, egging each other on, were next to impossible, and it was a rare day that one or both of us was not kept in after lessons, deprived of supper, or confined to the sanatorium.

And so we continued for months - years. Friends, allies - sometimes deadly enemies, though we were generally quick to reconcile and channel our energies into some more interesting diversion. Occasionally I became furiously jealous of her attentions to another girl; sometimes she grew tired of my hanging around her - for, while two years can sometimes seem like nothing at all, when one is at school and it is the space that separates you from an idol, it is a vast chasm. For the most part, though, we found it infinitely more diverting to run wild together.

 

However outrageous our exploits through the years, all paled before Maria's last desperate act. I understand from Ninetta, the youngest of the Strofzin girls, that they speak of it still, in hushed tones of admiration, as one might speak of men of legend and their deeds of derring-do. Though it seems that I still share the glory as I shared the punishment, I protest here that I was merely a supporting actor. All the inspiration, all of the scheme, and most of its execution, were Maria's.

It is true, of course, that most of us girls had at one time or another expressed the wish that we could go into Eschbach village for the midsummer festivities. I remember, when I was twelve or thirteen, perhaps, quizzing little Ludwig, who brought the post up to us sometimes, about them. He spoke of the music, of the dancing, the eating and the drinking, and the laughter. It sounded tremendous fun, and I wanted to go.

I never did, though; at least, not until a couple of years later, when Maria worked out a scheme that was both audacious and irresistible. As I have said, any of us might have dreamed of going. But only Maria would actually go, and return bringing the best part of it with her.

Well, I went too, of course, but I would never have done it without Maria.

She managed it like this: She behaved in a very subdued manner for a week, and so when, on midsummer night, she suddenly complained of a debilitating headache, no one was alarmed, and she was allowed to retire to bed early. I, meanwhile, went in to supper as normal, and, afterwards, slipped up to the seniors' dormitory. As expected, Maria's bed was occupied – by a bolster and a pair of pillows. And the window was open. Satisfied that all was well, I ran back downstairs, and sat through prayers in an agony of impatience.

At last we were finished. While the rest of my form streamed upstairs to the common room to while away the hour before bedtime with improving books or last-minute prep, I went out through the kitchens to the back door, and cut across the fields to Eschbach.

My initial thoughts, which dwelt with monotonous insistence upon the likely consequences of this escapade, were supplanted by excitement as I neared the village and heard the strains of flute and fiddle borne upon the breeze. I quickened my pace. As I came into the main square, where the band played and the villagers danced, my doubts fell away entirely. I was here now, and I might as well enjoy myself.

'Here's another one from the convent!' somebody shouted, and, grinning good-naturedly, took my hand and led me into the throng.

I have always loved dancing, and the whoops and the skirls, the insistent rhythm and the frantic pace, were a world away from the staid half-hour of gliding and curtseying we endured every Tuesday. My first partner passed me on to another fellow, and I danced two more sets with him before it even occurred to me to look for Maria. I stayed out one more before reluctantly abandoning the dancing.

I found my temptress in the inn, swilling a pot of beer as if born to it. At any other time I would have hesitated to go in, but the carnival mood held sway over me, and it seemed only natural to go in to join my friend. She was, I discovered, only very slightly tipsy, and was engaged in entertaining an enthralled audience of yokels with an (utterly spurious) account of the typical goings-on at school.

I pointed out that if the half of it were true we would have no reason to seek diversion in the village. Maria laughed and made me finish her ale, 'for it's high time you tried it; you can't drink milk all your life.'

'Only at school,' I protested. 'At home we drink wine.'

'Good German white, no doubt,' Maria said. 'Equally dull.' She watched me closely until I had drained the last drop, then (sensible, I suspect now, of something in the atmosphere that I had not seen) led me back outside.

Here the celebration was breaking up. A handful of zealous – and merry - stragglers continued to dance in the middle of the square, to the music of one last dedicated tin whistle, but most people had retired home, or to the inn, or to somewhere else, for what purposes I knew not.

'You know,' Maria said, 'you're quite right. School isn't nearly so much fun as this.' And she strode up to the little group and said something to the whistler. He burst out laughing. 'Very nice, your ladyship! I'm all for it!'

I was not sure what he was all for, but when Maria started leading them off out of the village, and he and the dancers followed, I began to get an inkling.

'Wait!' said one of the men. 'If all they get at that convent is milk, I'm not going without supplies of my own.'

'Catch us up, Johann,' a girl said to him.

I saw Maria slip him a few coins. No doubt the 'supplies' would be ample.

I will freely admit that we were not the quietest wanderers that ever walked (or, in some cases, staggered or skipped) from Eschbach to the convent. Maria did wonders in hushing them as we approached. The two of us held a brief council, largely centred upon the fact that it was going to be difficult enough to get ourselves back into the building, let alone half a dozen drunken revellers and the cask of ale borne by the enterprising Johann.

'But what's the point, if the others don't get a chance to enjoy this?' I protested. 'We might as well have stayed in Eschbach.'

Maria took little convincing. 'Very well. You go up to the dorms and get the others out.'

I glared at her. I had no intention of shinning up the drainpipe to get into the seniors' dormitory. She knew my feelings on heights.

' _I_ shall go, then.' And she was off, while I attempted to herd our followers into a secluded corner of the gardens, out of sight and (I devoutly hoped) earshot of the buildings.

She did well. Sophia, Antonia, Malgorzata and Friederike followed her out, and she seemed to have avoided rousing any of the prefects or other known sneaks. Indeed, we managed the best part of a dance and a half before I chanced to look around (Maria being occupied in kissing someone very thoroughly in the shrubbery) and saw Reverend Mother herself striding across the lawn...

 

I was sent home in disgrace. Disgrace itself I might not have minded, but the disappointment on my parents' faces was a hard pill to swallow. Heinrich, I think, was a little embarrassed; Leopold affected ignorance, but Karl looked up to me as a being of daring and wonder. This lifted my spirits a little, I admit, but for the most part of July I moped around the house in a prolonged fit of the sulks.

What cut sharpest was the knowledge that when I returned to school in the autumn Maria would be gone, while I still had two years to work out, and I would surely never see her again. Certainly she would go out to her aunt in America. And I had not even said goodbye. No one, I was sure, had ever been as miserable as I was then; no one had been so ill used.

I was poor company indeed all through the summer, until the day Mama came to the nursery (where I was engaged in tearing a magazine into tiny shreds) and instructed me to make myself presentable.

'Goodness knows why,' she said, 'but the Queen has asked to see you.'

 

If you have read my father's account of the last days of Rudolf V, you must know that my mother was lady-in-waiting to the Queen, and at times her sole confidante. Mama was obliged to retire from court life during the years of her children's infancy, but the Queen continued to rely on her as a faithful friend. Now that we were of an age to be left with less devoted carers, she had returned to the Queen's right hand.

Nor had my father's devotion to the Queen wavered. Though she had brought in a series of reforms that scandalised Uncle Sapt and revolutionised Ruritania, Papa loyally declared that the country had never been so great. (And indeed, even from where I look back now, I believe he, and she, had the right of it. Though Rudolf V might not have recognised his widow's parliament even sober, was that such an ill thing? No, the reign of Queen Flavia was truly a golden age.)

And Papa had become great along with Ruritania. Always a popular man and a skilled soldier, he had occupied a number of prestigious posts in the Queen's household and was confidently expected to rise higher still. Despite their worries over their children (and it must be admitted that I was by far the most troublesome on that score) my parents were, by and large, happy and comfortable.

But let me return to the day I went to see the Queen. I had, of course, met her before; indeed, she was Heinrich's godmother, and when I was a little girl and Mama was not so much at the palace she often visited our house. Since I had been away at school, however, I had seen her but once or twice. This, then, was an unexpected and undeserved treat.

I washed and dressed with bad grace none the less, but Mama eventually pronounced herself satisfied, and off we went.

 

The palace stands on the southern edge of the old town of Strelsau; the new town has grown up on three sides, and our house was in the north-east quarter. Those who have visited the capital will know that the old town is singularly cramped and confused in its layout; therefore, while it was further in terms of distance to drive from home to the palace along the wide boulevards that made up the Neustadt, it took considerably less time than going through the Altstadt.

The palace itself had been destroyed and rebuilt, to a greater or lesser extent, once a century on average since it was first built as a fortress by Rudolf I. The last refurbishment had largely been due to the damage done in the troubles of 1848, when Ruritania went nobly and fruitlessly insane with the rest of Europe; while the Royal Palace was left relatively unscathed compared to the White Palace, which was utterly destroyed, its east wing was unusable and the gardens fit only for pigs. Extensive repairs and improvements were carried out by Rudolf IV after order was restored to the city, and the present palace was a gracious, if ornate, building in spacious grounds.

To visit the palace was a treat in itself, as I acknowledged even in my present fit of the sulks, and to see the Queen was a pleasure as well as an honour. No matter how pressing the affairs of state, she would listen to us Tarlenheim brats as if she had all the time in the world. We all four of us adored her – much as our parents did. The cares of a reign of a score of years had left their mark on her countenance; strands of silver ran through the glorious Elphberg red hair, and her face bore lines of grief and worry, but to all of us she was perfect, the serene ruler of the greatest country on Earth, our captain, our protector – and our friend.

Thinking on all this as we drove, I was a wreck of remorse before I so much as came into her presence. The Queen made no mention of my poor conduct, though I am sure she knew of it. Rather, she spoke gently to me, spoke briefly of lessons and long of her love for Ruritania. I left her feeling chastened, certainly, but, more than that, inspired by her great love and sense of duty, and remembering that I was a Tarlenheim, and that our duty was to the Queen before all earthly things.

 

If I was repentant then, it was nothing to my mood when we met Papa on our way out of the royal apartments. I suspect now that this was not coincidence; at any rate, I was mollified to receive a smile, and accepted with alacrity his suggestion that we spend the rest of the afternoon together. I did, after all, see so little of Papa, and my beloved Queen had spoken of him in such affectionate terms that I found myself forgiving him and Mama for their unreasonable behaviour.

'I thought we might go to the cathedral,' he said.

I had no great interest in the building itself, but it was something of a novelty to ride through the Altstadt (as we would be obliged to do to get there), which was notoriously dirty, dangerous and generally exciting, and so I acquiesced.

Papa, perhaps noticing my interest in the sights and sounds outside our carriage, at once began to point out to me the buildings and persons of interest. 'That's the quickest way to the university... that tavern there is where Ludwig of Modenstein was assassinated in 1676... good heavens, there's old Frau Holf; she must be an enormous age! When the late king was crowned all the streets were hung with pictures of Black Michael; old Strelsau never knew what was good for it, though I suppose they could have been forgiven for ignorance in that particular case...'

I, meanwhile, watched the scene outside with great interest: an altercation between an orange seller and a butcher's boy; a woman displaying a remarkable décolleté crossing the street; a couple of soldiers playing cards outside an inn; and a priest scurrying up the long flight of steps to the cathedral – a quicker route, of course, than the one that we were obliged to take.

Still, we arrived without undue delay, and Papa handed me down from the carriage like a real lady. I laughed as he took my arm and led me inside.

The interior was a great dim cave. Gilt glinted in the niches; the afternoon sunlight slanted through the windows, blood red, rich blue and, where the glass was clear, pure white. The scent of incense lingered in the air. I wanted to stand still for a moment to marvel at the height of the vault, the soaring pointed arches, the sheer space enclosed in age-old stones, but Papa was already moving, reverently but purposefully, towards the great monument to Rudolf V.

'A great man,' he said, 'and a great king.'

I stood reverently by his side, and read out the words that we Tarlenheim children had engraved on our hearts: _Rudolfo, qui in hac civitate nuper regnavit in corde ipsius in aeternam regnat. Flavia Regina_.

'Papa,' I said suddenly, 'you must tell me about King Rudolf. You always skip straight to Queen Flavia. I can't help but feel that you want to tell me more than you ever do.'

He laughed – a little awkwardly, to my mind. 'You forget, my love, that what the good nuns teach you as ancient history is part of my own lifetime, and I was privileged to call the last King of Ruritania my friend as well as my sovereign. I saw him die, remember; it's a painful subject.'

Unfairly, I pressed my advantage. 'But you're never consistent, Papa. One minute you say to Mama how fortunate we are that Queen Flavia succeeded when she did, and the next you are mourning the greatest king who ever lived. Why, it's almost as if there were two King Rudolfs!'

Papa blushed bright red, and managed a feeble joke about this having been the fifth. 'However,' he said, 'I suppose you might as well know. It's much better that you hear the full story, rather than guess half of it. Come, let's go home.'

He strode towards the door. Intrigued and – yes – a little frightened, I hurried after him.

It was not until the carriage was in motion and the windows firmly closed that Papa said, 'Now. Tell me how much you know about the accession and death of Rudolf V, and I will endeavour to mend the omissions.'

Deliciously conscious that I was standing on the threshold of esoteric grown-up knowledge, I summarised the events as succinctly as I could manage: 'He was crowned in 1875, following the death of Rudolf IV of an apoplexy. There had been some fear that the King's half-brother Michael, popularly known as 'Black Michael', would stage a coup, but he was killed in a scuffle at Castle Zenda shortly after the coronation. The King then married the Princess Flavia. He reigned for three years, before he was assassinated by a man named Bauer, whom -'

'Whom I saw killed by Lieutenant Rischenheim, your godfather,' Papa finished. 'That's true, in so far as it goes. But -'

And as we jolted through the streets of the Altstadt my father told me the story of Rudolf Rassendyll, that noble English gentleman with the King's face, who saved the crown of Ruritania by receiving it, who loved the Queen, and who was called once more to take the King's place. He told me of the villainy of Rupert Hentzau, who killed the true King and was killed in his turn by Rudolf Rassendyll. He admitted – Papa, the loyal monarchist! - that the Englishman had made a better King for Ruritania than the rightful heir; he hinted that the Queen had perhaps loved Rassendyll more than she loved the King she was bound to marry. 'Heaven doesn't always make the right men kings,' he finished, 'though, thank God, the right woman is Queen now.'

Shocked, though in my deepest being I had somehow known this all along, I swore, though he had not asked me, that I would never tell another living soul. And it was a long time before I broke that promise.


	3. A Welcome Diversion, and a More Welcomed Vistor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Elisabeth finds life at court interesting, but not so interesting as a certain old friend...

My last two years at school passed without incident, and at last, in the summer of 1897, I was returned to the bosom of my family. I settled back into the routine of the house in Strelsau as if I had never been gone. My career henceforth was obvious: firstly, to serve the Queen wherever possible; secondly, to marry, if expedient. I had my reservations about the latter, though I supposed it would happen sooner or later without my having to do much about it, but I was all in favour of the former.

I began to accompany my mother to the palace almost every day. The Queen was fond of me for my mother's sake, my duties were light, and I found it fascinating to observe the process of government from back stage, as it were. Nuns are popularly supposed to be above the things of this world, but even in my religious backwater I had picked up a reasonable grounding in social graces and etiquette, though there was much to be learnt that was specific to the Ruritanian court. I shan't waste paper and ink on the details; they might interest a social historian, perhaps, but I am dealing with matters of more moment.

Every morning I set my watch when the cathedral clock struck eight, rode to the palace with Mama, curtsied to the Queen, bobbed to the ministers, listened politely, remembered dignitaries' names, fetched and carried, and generally made myself indispensable. At midday I would return home, and most evenings I would be back at the palace by half past four to attend the Queen as she prepared for the night's solemnities. She never danced any more, but her parties were gay and glittering and frequently a source of great interest, speaking politically as well as socially.

I danced sometimes at those parties; the Queen encouraged it, and the diplomats and dignitaries often asked me. I had become personable enough; I was not ill-favoured, my mousy hair having darkened to a more striking deep brown, my eyes being dark and my figure not bad. I could dance (elegantly, as well as enthusiastically) and make polite conversation. I would, I suppose, have made a pleasing bride for some fellow in the service.

Fate - or someone else - had other ideas. Some nine months after I had embarked upon this career, it so happened that the Queen was engaged in negotiations of great delicacy with the Grand Duke of Mittenheim, concerning the long-disputed border between that principality and Ruritania. Discreet as I had already proved myself, yet I was judged to be too young to be involved in this debate, even as a listener. Mama alone would attend the Queen at the meetings in the morning and the dinner in the evening.

I, therefore, remained at home, rather bored, and trying not to sulk. Heinrich and Leopold were, of course, at the barracks; Karl was away at school, and Papa was also at the palace, acting as an intermediary between the palace and the army - for the latter had its own ideas about the border. I sat in the garden, watched a ladybird crawl up the trellis, tired of watching it, and came in again; I tried to read, and set the book down; to sew, and laid the work aside. For two pins I would have thrown propriety to the four winds and walked all around Strelsau on my own and without a hat - but I clung to the notion that they might need me at the palace after all, and feared to be away when I was sent for.

I was somewhere between the morning room and the rose bed when the bell rang. 'Whoever it is, send them through,' I called to Fischer, for I would have happily invited the grocer's boy in for tea and bored him witless. Settling on the garden, I sat down on a bench and waited impatiently.

The person who clattered through the house close behind Fischer was not the grocer's boy.

'Miss Adler,' Fischer said, with no apparent understanding of the momentousness of this visit. I rose to my feet.

'Maria!'

'So - a pleasant surprise? I hope so.' She had picked up something of an American accent, and I found it rather attractive. 'You've grown up, Elsa.'

'Well, indeed, you could hardly expect me not to,' I retorted, but I was smiling. 'I thought you had gone for good.'

'I? No, Elsa, I've gone to the bad; I've made New York too hot to hold me, and I've come back to Ruritania to stir things up a little here.'

I could not help looking at her. She seemed taller, though that must have been an illusion, or high heels. She had, of course, put her hair up; it emphasised her long neck, and little curls danced around her face in the most beguiling manner. The firm line of the jaw, the humorous mouth, the light of mischief in the blue eyes, though, these were the same as I remembered from our schooldays. Her dress looked new - a fashion I did not recognise, American, I supposed - well-made and a beautiful red colour, but the tiniest bit flashy. I saw her scrutinise me in the same manner, and I wondered what she made of me.

'Sit down,' I said, 'and I'll ring for coffee. You do drink coffee?' For one never knew; at school we had only ever had milk, cold in the day time and hot in the evening, and from what I had heard of New York, nobody drank anything but champagne or whisky.

'It sounds divine,' she said.

'Tell me about America,' I said. 'Where did you go? Were you really sent back here in disgrace?'

'That wasn't what I said,' she laughed. 'I came of my own accord. It seemed expedient.'

'But why?'

She looked at me speculatively. 'Why, my dear, you could guess if you were only brave enough. But I'll tell you. It was a love affair.'

'Oh.' Suddenly I was bitterly jealous. 'I thought -'

'You thought that, when a love affair goes wrong, it's not the lady in the affair who has to clear out?'

That had not crossed my mind, but I nodded for my pride's sake.

'Quite right. The lady in the affair was called Daisy; she was - no, I won't tell you whose daughter she was. Not yet. But she was the lady, and I wasn't, and so I left, you see, and here I am.'

She took one swift step towards me, and I, despite myself, took one step towards her, and she drew me to her and kissed me.

Maria had often kissed me before; she was as profligate with caresses as she was with money, and never seemed to run short of either, the rogue – but this was different. Now she kissed me full on the lips, hard and urgent, as a man might, as a lover might. And I? Well, reader, would you not have let her? Would you, indeed, not have responded?

Of a sudden, she pulled away. My cheeks were reddening, my breath quickening - and somehow I was not altogether surprised. Perhaps I had always known, somehow, that when I first knew love it would come like this. Not necessarily like this in a walled garden, where the air was heavy with the scent of roses and lavender, and the birds sang, and far beyond it all was the hum of the city, but like this, with a woman who knew me as I knew myself. A woman's lips on mine, a woman's hand caught in my hair, a woman's bosom on which to lay my head.

'Ah, Elsa!' she said, smiling, though her breath was quick too. 'I wondered - yes, I wondered.'

I looked at her - could not look away - for some moments. Then I mustered enough presence of mind to ring for coffee.

'What now?' I asked when it had come, though perhaps I meant, Will you kiss me again?

'Who knows?' Maria said, but she kissed me. 'I will stay in Strelsau for as long as I can do so without outraging the delicate sensibilities of Ruritanian society, or perhaps until I tire of it; you will continue to receive me, or perhaps you won't; you will do the decent thing and marry some poor boy you'll never love - or perhaps you won't.'

She was only teasing, but it stung. 'I'll love where I marry,' I declared, 'though I may not marry where I love.'

'Brave words! Does your mother know your bohemian ideas on this matter?'

'She expects me to marry for love.'

'She expects you to marry.'

'Well, I suppose so,' I said uncertainly. 'But I don't think she'd be surprised if I didn't. And I'm the only girl, you know; that makes a difference.'

'Perhaps. Your father?'

'Is guided by my mother in all such important matters.'

'Very well.' She was, I suppose, trying to tell me what I already knew: that a love like ours - for love it seemed to me then - could never be shown to the world outside. I cared not one whit: that kiss, that sunlit afternoon in the walled garden, that was enough for me. That she had kissed me today; that I might see her tomorrow: what more could the heart desire?

'Where are you living?' I asked.

'On the Stephanplatz,' she said. 'With the Countess von Regensberg - you know her? She specialises in picking up young ladies who are not usually received in the best places, dusting them off, and introducing them to polite society. Society, of course, is polite enough to forget why they were not received in the first place, because one is well-advised not to offend the Countess. I am her latest project.'

'I'm surprised she's interested in you,' I said. 'She usually tackles more challenging projects. Why, so far as I know there's not a whiff of scandal connected with you.'

'Nobody knows who I am, so that's hardly surprising. I told the Countess about Daisy, though; she was very interested.'

'Tell me about Daisy,' I said, though I could feel a tide of jealousy rising within me.

'Oh, there's very little to tell,' Maria said. 'A kiss or two, an outraged parent, tears, quarrels, and the boat back to Europe. I fear it did little for her matrimonial prospects, and her mama is more ambitious than yours.'

Matrimony! It seemed a world away. So far as I was concerned, the unknown Daisy was welcome to it, if she could get it. My heart was singing, and I knew now why the polite attentions of the vapid attachés had made no impression upon it.

Somewhere, far away, the great clock on the cathedral struck the hour of three, and all over the city smaller bells echoed it. The chimes came faintly from the grandfather clock in the hall, and, though I would have had Maria stay all day and all night just to look at her, I could not quite see my way to explaining her visit to anyone.

'My brothers will be home soon,' I said.

She smiled. 'I shan't ask you to introduce me. Not today, at any rate.' She bent suddenly and kissed me, kissed me as she had the first time.

And she left me in a hopeless mixture of joy and confusion.


	4. A Fortunate Meeting, and a Bargain

Some few weeks later, I was walking in the Public Gardens, where once the White Palace stood, with my brother Heinrich. Maria had called twice more, each time leaving me deeper under her spell. She filled my thoughts by day and my dreams by night, and the very mention of her name brought a blush to my cheeks.

My heart sank, therefore, when, crossing the gravel path before us, I saw Theresa von Strofzin, her mother (my Aunt Magdalena) and four dogs. Theresa was sure to know of Maria's unexpected return, and equally certain to speak of it to me - and, I feared, she was almost as likely to discern my wonderful, shameful, glorious secret, and tell all Strelsau. Nor was there any way of escaping, for Heinrich had already hailed them.

'Good afternoon,' he said with a gallant bow, and almost tripped over the smallest of the dogs. Despite my preoccupation, I smiled.

Theresa said, 'You've heard the news, Elisabeth? Maria Adler has returned to Ruritania.'

I looked at the ground, at my brother - everywhere but Theresa's eyes - and over her shoulder I saw my rescuer. As I stammered out, 'Indeed, yes -' and felt my face flush to crimson, Heinrich's friend Nikolas von Werdenstein greeted us with a smile and a bow and a cheerful 'Ladies! Heinz!'

I turned to him with no little relief. 'Why, Nikolas - how lovely to see you.'

'Indeed, Elsa' he said, 'I might say the same'.

I felt Theresa's eyes boring into me.

My brother Heinrich prides himself on his tact. Perceiving my discomfiture, and assuming that Nikolas was the cause of it, he immediately proposed to the Strofzins that he walk with them a little way. This pleased Magdalena, I could tell (for, after all, Heinz is a personable young man), though her daughter seemed less taken with him. Heinrich offered her his arm, however, and she had no choice but to take it. She called 'Kaiser! Fidelio!' and the dogs scampered after her.

'Well, Elsa,' Nikolas said, when we had dropped back a respectable distance for a tête-à-tête, 'who is the cause of that pretty blush I interrupted? It is not me, I am sure, for it began before you saw me.'

'That,' said I, 'I cannot tell you.' I had never quite learned how to flirt with men, and the encounter with Theresa had put me on my guard.

He tugged at his moustache. 'Oh? Someone unsuitable, then?'

'Entirely unsuitable,' I said.

'I shall not press you, then,' he said. 'But it's a coincidence, you know; it's a coincidence.'

'Oh?'

'Why, I'm in love with someone myself. Also someone highly unsuitable.'

That, I noted with relief, put me out of the picture: so far as Strelsau was concerned, he and I would have been the perfect match. A declaration of love from Nikolas, dearest and best of friends though he might be, would have been a complication too far. I smiled to myself, but made no answer.

'And since you have the delicacy not to ask, I shan't tell you.'

'I am sure,' I said, 'that we shall both do better if we remain in ignorance of each other's private affairs.'

'Wise words indeed!' he laughed. He whistled a few bars of _Voi che sapete_ , which ought to have told me everything. 'Still, since we are both here, both in love with someone utterly -'

'Unsuitable,' I finished.

'Indeed, unsuitable - it strikes me that we might turn this situation to our mutual advantage.'

'What had you in mind?' I asked, though I already had an inkling.

'Why, since you and I would, through a singular piece of irony, be an utterly suitable match for each other, had we happened to be in love with each other -'

'Which I suspect is the conclusion that my dear brother has already jumped to, and the Strofzins will have it all over Strelsau within the hour -'

'Quite so - we might profitably fail to correct this misapprehension, and thus avoid awkward questions from those who might be happier minding their own business.'

I laughed. Certainly this presented a useful diversion for the moment, and as for what might come after the moment, well, I did not think of it. 'Very well, then.'

'Your brother is looking back at us. Quickly, Countess von Tarlenheim, take my arm.'

'So sudden, Captain von Werdenstein?' Now that we had delineated the part, I felt more confident playing it. 'Oh, but they're all looking now!'

He turned to face me, and raised my hand to his lips. 'A kiss to seal the bargain,' he explained.

 

Women, they say, are not supposed to understand politics. To this I can only retort that one can scarcely exist more than a day or so in the Tarlenheim household without absorbing some awareness of the world around oneself.

It was more surprising to find that Theresa von Strofzin, one of five sisters, and a family that was not nearly so involved in government, was equally well-informed. I have said that she was a gossip, and perhaps I was unfair. When men talk to other men of their acquaintances and their acquaintances' doings it is not called gossip, after all.

In early July I went to the Strofzins' for a small tea party: myself, the Strofzin girls, and Sophia Helsing. Theresa dominated the conversation; she was liable to flit from my engagement (or, rather, my lack of engagement, and really, did I think it was quite right to be carrying on, to use a vulgar term, with Captain von Werdenstein without a firm commitment...?) to the latest opinion of Augustus, Grand Duke of Mittenheim, as discussed in Mittenheim, to the gnomic pronouncements of her father's intellectual friends, to the latest fashion in sleeves, almost without having to draw breath.

'You were in Mittenheim recently, then?' I asked, seizing upon the most interesting and least dangerous topic.

'Oh, indeed, yes,' she said. 'I visited Papa's estates with him and Eva.'

She looked at me keenly, wondering, I supposed, whether I was interested as I appeared. I did my best to encourage her. 'What do they think, then, about the border dispute?'

'On the whole, the populace is more worried about the economy. There are a few landowners who would rather be on our side of the border than theirs – some kind of difference in the land tax, I believe, that is advantageous to the Ruritanian over the Mittenheimer. In any case, the general feeling is that it will all have to be renegotiated sooner or later, so this is a waste of time.'

'Renegotiated?'

'Well – the Queen has, if anything, been trying to appease the Grand Duke's ambitions. Another monarch might well have other ideas.'

Privately I disagreed with her reading of the Queen's approach, but the latter part of her statement was the one that worried me. 'If the Duke of Elbe were to succeed to the throne, you mean...?'

'He's heir presumptive,' Theresa pointed out. 'It seems unlikely that the Queen will marry again, so to all intents and purposes he's next in line. I don't believe that Mittenheim looks forward to that prospect.'

Sophia, obviously bored, started talking about hats, and the rest of them followed suit. But I saw Theresa look at me sharply for a moment, before she too began recommending milliners.


	5. Shadows of Old Sins

I may have given the impression that I was preoccupied by my personal life – and so I was. For most of the rest of that year I existed purely for the moments when I could see Maria.

Even I, however, could hardly fail to take notice when my mother said, in a queer anxious tone that I had never heard from her, 'The Queen is ill,' Never heard? Nay, once, and now I heard it again I understood the meaning of the first time.

While I freely admit to being a thoroughly horrid child, I was no sneak, and for all the world I would not have listened to the conversation I am about to relate had I understood the import of the matters touched upon, or, indeed, had I been able to escape hearing it.

I was perhaps five years old, and I was ill - a fever of some sort, I believe. Mama had suffered me to lie on the sofa in her morning room - a great treat, only allowed when we were ill - and I believe that, when the Queen came to see her, they both thought me asleep, and so talked freely.

Here, then, is that conversation as I remember it, and as I have reconstructed it with what I have since learned:

'No betrothal, then, your Majesty?' Mama said, teasing. 'Indeed, we were all expecting that English prince to make his intentions known.'

'Ah, no, Helga,' the Queen said. 'I have had someone else attend on me, and I must confess that I was more interested in what _he_ had to say.' Though her words were jesting, her tone was sad.

'Who?' Mama demanded.

'Why, Thierry Villefort, the French doctor. It is bad news, Helga.' Here I tried very hard not to listen, and the effort must have resulted in an expression of agony, for Mama laid her hand on my forehead in some alarm.

'Tell me,' she said to the Queen, meanwhile.

'It is soon told. He can cure me, he believes, but there would have to be an operation, and I could never have children afterwards.'

Mama took her hand away from my forehead. I think she must have leaned forward to clasp both of the Queen's. 'Ah, Flavia!' (And since that day I have only once heard her speak so to the Queen.) 'But you will be cured?'

'He thinks so. He hopes so. But, you see, there is no use now in talking of marriage. Why does one marry, if not for love or for an heir? Well, I have known all the love that is my share this side of the grave, and I cannot now hope for an heir. So the English prince has returned disappointed. I know -' as if to forestall some comment of Mama's '-we had all hoped for a new Elphberg child. But it can't happen, and so I shan't give myself into a union that will do no good to anyone.

At this juncture I think I must at last have succeeded in falling asleep, for I remember no more.

 

'The Queen is ill?' Papa echoed, teaspoon rattling in his cup.

Mama nodded gravely.

'Is it – curable?'

'It may be,' Mama said, in tones that said all too plainly that she feared the opposite.

None of us spoke for some minutes. At last Papa, his voice thick with emotion, said, 'I had better go. The Queen wanted to discuss the treaty...'

For Mittenheim had accepted terms at long last, and I saw at once that it was imperative that the treaty be signed before news of the Queen's illness could become known.

I followed Papa out to the hall. He took his hat from Fischer with a hand that was not quite steady. 'Look after her, Elsa,' he said. 'Look after her.'

 

For all my brave words to Maria that day in the garden, I was obliged to at least consider the idea of marriage. Left to ourselves, Nikolas and I would have jogged along quite happily in what we saw as a useful arrangement and what the rest of the world saw as an innocent flirtation. However, having Heinrich know from the beginning proved troublesome. Jealous of his little sister's reputation, he was far more insistent than Theresa that we ought to come to some agreement.

I did my best to put him off, saying that I was reluctant to marry (and, therefore, potentially absent myself from court for months at a time – Heinrich blushed at this allusion) while the Queen's health was so uncertain. Besides, I said, Mama had enough to worry about without a wedding.

Nikolas did his best to put him off, citing his relative youth and limited salary. Neither of us, of course, mentioned the real reasons for our reluctance.

Heinrich was more convinced (or, perhaps, embarrassed) by my excuses than by Nikolas', but maintained that a long engagement would answer all my concerns, and would be preferable to the current state of uncertainty. It came to the point where we agreed that to resist further could only have aroused suspicion, and so Nikolas went to see my father.

Papa was so pleased that I felt quite guilty for deceiving him. He and Mama readily agreed that no attempt should be made to name a date until the crisis in the Queen's health should be resolved. I resolved not to think about it until it became troublesome, and to devote myself to the Queen.

 

Nikolas, meanwhile, told me the whole story of his entanglement by way of an engagement present. He had let details slip from time to time – I knew, for example, his inamorata's Christian name, from which information I was able to take a stab at her identity (accurately, as it transpired). This, though, was the first time I had heard the tale from beginning to end.

'She's the Baroness von ---, you know,' he said, and blew a smoke ring towards the ceiling. (See how careful I am with others' secrets, even while I flaunt my own?)

We were sitting by the fire in the drawing room. Heinrich and Leopold were absorbed in a game of cards, and Nikolas and I spoke – as affianced lovers might well do – in low voices.

I smiled. 'I did wonder.'

Poor Nikolas – he thought he had been so discreet! 'You know her?' he said.

'Slightly. The Baron is often at court.' I shot a teasing glance at him. 'Too often, perhaps?'

'One might say that,' he admitted. 'Certainly he was at court on a certain Saturday in May, when I had been invited to stay with the Krafsteins in the Hauptwald.'

I started. Nikolas raised an interrogative eyebrow.

'Many things begin in the Hauptwald, it seems,' I said by way of explanation. 'Go on.'

'Very well. I was staying with the Krafsteins, then. So was the Baroness.'

'So I had surmised.'

Nikolas glared at me. 'I first saw her when she came down to dinner on that first night. She was wearing some sort of blue floating thing, and she was the most wonderful thing I'd ever seen.' He sighed.

'Love at first sight?' I asked.

'Indubitably.' A dreamy expression settled on his countenance.

I let it stay there for some moments, and then said with some irony, 'Tell me, then. Is it a story of courtly love, of noble intentions and stolen kisses, forbidden thoughts that seep somehow into forbidden deeds?'

He looked sharply at me. 'Something like that. Is yours?'

'Yes,' I admitted.

'I'm very curious,' he said. 'I can't think who it might be. You might tell me. I told you mine, after all.'

'Ah, but I'd already guessed. No, I shan't tell you – but if you guess, I'll tell you whether you're right or not.'

'That's not entirely fair, Elsa,' he grumbled, 'but I can see it's the best I'll get.'

I allowed myself to think of Maria, and no doubt that dreamy look came across my own face. Swiftly, I changed the subject. 'You met the Baroness at the Krafsteins'...'

'Yes. That first night I could not take my eyes off her. That mouth! Have you noticed her mouth, Elsa? I don't suppose you would have done – it's not the kind of thing that a woman would notice. She barely saw me, of course. What could there be about me to interest her? The next day, though, I managed to find her alone in the garden. She – seemed to find me amusing.'

'As who would not?'

Nikolas laughed, for he was a man like any other, and as susceptible to flattery. 'She let me kiss her. After that – well, we were only at the Krafsteins' for a couple of days. But after all, she's often in Strelsau, and I seem to manage to find moments when the good Baron isn't at home...'

I nodded. A thought struck me. 'Nikolas – when we are married – if it gets that far – will you expect me to...?'

He glanced over his shoulder at my brothers; they, however, seemed happily occupied in their game. 'I will ask you to do nothing that you would rather not. And I can think of far worse things than to know you as a friend until death part us.'


	6. The Cost of the Queen's Service

Fate, however, can send men and women down paths of whose existence they had never dreamed, and laughs at those who make plans and schemes.  
 ****  
It was a bright day in early December, and the Queen had been to a service at the cathedral to mark the twentieth anniversary of her accession. Mama and I had sat behind her all through the ceremony, and now we were driving back to the Palace, Uncle Sapt sat on her left, and Papa on her right. It was a glorious service, an explosion of praise and thanksgiving for twenty years of peaceful rule. The Queen herself was a little subdued, as she always was on these occasions, but the heartfelt shouts of the crowd cheered her, I think.  
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And then -  
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It happened more quickly than I can tell it. A movement in the crowd that seemed distinct from the waving around it. A glint of metal that was not tinsel. In the cheering, a scream. In the whistling, a shot.  
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Papa saw. He saw before any of us, and before any of us could move he had leapt in front of the Queen. Mama screamed; the carriage swerved.  
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His tunic bloomed red.  
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He lived only a very little while. I held his hand, and he smiled at me. Mama laid her cheek against his and her hot tears mingled with his blood. And the Queen, weeping, kissed his forehead. And his sons all three broke ranks and ran towards the carriage.  
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He murmured, 'I can think of no happier way.'  
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And that was how Friedrich von Tarlenheim came to his end, in the service of the Queen he loved, and with those that loved him by his side.  
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Uncle Sapt lost no time in rallying the Palace Guards and the Strelsau Police to apprehend the assassin. I envied him this recourse to industry; there was, of course, little that I could do, and I felt that, had I been able to do something towards avenging my father, I would have been less susceptible to tears. As it was, I could only weep, and leave it to Uncle Sapt.  
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He was an old friend. I have seen a picture of Uncle Sapt that was taken the year of the Queen's coronation. He was short, stocky and grizzled then; he has become more so with the passing of the years. He was, of course, one of Papa's greatest friends, and, if it were proportional to the effort that he put into finding and punishing the killer, his grief was great.  
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Perhaps twenty-seven hours passed between my father's death and the moment when Uncle Sapt was shown into Mama's sitting room, where she and I had been receiving sympathetic callers. He crossed the floor in a few strides, took her hand and pressed it awkwardly, and said without preamble. 'Well, Helga, we got the cur.'  
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Mama was unable to speak, so great was her emotion. I said, 'Who is it?'  
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'Some damned dog of a Mittenheimer.' He had never troubled to modify his language in the presence of ladies, and, even had he been, this occasion was surely excuse enough for a lapse. 'And before we've finished with him he'll have cause to wish we'd got him two days before,' he growled.  
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'Why should a Mittenheimer wish to kill the Queen?' Karl asked at dinner.  
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'He must be a lunatic, surely,' Leopold said.  
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But Mama shook her head. 'I think,' she said, 'the time has come to tell you all of something that your father and I knew for some time. Knowing that you are my children, and your father's children, that you embody all the good qualities of the Tarlenheims, and that above all you can be trusted to act in perfect loyalty to Her Majesty the Queen, I have no hesitation in telling you.'  
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She paused for a moment, perhaps waiting for us to comprehend the gravity of the declaration. Then she continued, 'You said, Leopold, that the assassin must be a lunatic. And, since his attempt failed -' her voice shook '- that is the very story that will be circulated by his employers. Only a lunatic, they will say in Mittenheim, would have made such an outrageous attempt upon the life of the Queen of Ruritania, their greatest ally. Had he succeeded, however -'  
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'Go on,' I urged her.  
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'Had he succeeded and lived, he would be a hero in Mittenheim. Had he succeeded and died, he would be a martyr. The Grand Duke's troops might even now be in the streets of Strelsau.'  
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Heinrich glanced towards the window as if he expected to see a regiment outside. 'How do you know all this?' he asked.  
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Heinrich has always underestimated Mama.  
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'Why, the Queen and your father told me between them,' she said drily. 'Do you disbelieve me?'  
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'No,' he admitted, 'it sounds all too plausible. But what claim can the Grand Duke have upon Ruritania herself?'  
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'They say, might is right,' Mama pointed out. 'But in actual fact the Grand Duke does have a claim to the throne - of sorts. He is, after all, descended from Heinrich the Lion, by way of the beautiful Princess Osra.'  
 ****  
'That's surely a strong claim,' Leopold said.  
 ****  
'Indeed,' Mama said, 'but there are stronger within Ruritania. You know,' she went on, choosing her words with care, 'that shortly before the coronation of Rudolf V there was an attempted coup, a coup that your father was instrumental in thwarting.'  
 ****  
'What of it?' I asked.  
 ****  
'Have you wondered who might be on the throne today, had it been successful?'  
 ****  
'Why, Black Michael, of course,' Heinrich said, surprised.  
 ****  
Mama smiled. 'That was what your father always said, but it never seemed likely. Why Michael, when his claim to the throne was patently less than Rudolf's? Why Michael, when he had a better claimant within his own coterie?'  
 ****  
'Who?'  
 ****  
'Oh, Heinrich, don't you know your history? Haven't you studied the reign of Rudolf III?'  
 ****  
'Of course.'  
 ****  
'Well, then, consider this: Rudolf IV's second marriage was morganatic. Rudolf V was the true heir, yes, and our own Queen the heir to him. But Michael was only a half-brother, and even had he married the Princess Flavia he could never have been more than Consort.  
 ****  
'Hypothetically speaking, then, if the morganatic line has the lesser claim, we must follow Prince Heinrich's line. Now do you see?'  
 ****  
We did not.  
 ****  
Mama sighed. 'Oh, children. Surely your father told you of the Six?'  
 ****  
'The Six?' Heinrich repeated. 'Well, it can't have been Bersonin, Detchard or de Gautet.'  
 ****  
'Nor Hentzau,' Leopold put in, 'or there would have been trouble later.'  
 ****  
'The Hentzaus,' Mama said, 'are trouble enough on their own. I dread to think what sort of pretender one might make. No, it wasn't Rupert.'  
 ****  
'Krafstein, then, or - my God! Lauengram!'  
 ****  
Mama smiled. 'Indeed. Lauengram. He should have been Elphberg-Lauengram, you know; he was descended from Prince Heinrich, but his grandfather fell out with Rudolf IV. The King of Ruritania survived that night in the castle of Zenda, but the next man in line to the throne died.'  
 ****  
'The next _man_ ,' Karl protested stoutly.  
 ****  
'Yes,' said Mama, 'and had Albert von Lauengram not died then, he would be the next in line to the throne now. As it is, his cousin Philipp is heir presumptive.' She shook her head. 'I had rather you remembered what manner of man is the Duke of Elbe, or, at least, where the Lauengram loyalties lie; he may well be king in – a year or so.'  
 ****  
'Ah, but what of then?' I asked, more concerned with the past than the future. 'Did Michael intend to put Albert von Lauengram on the throne?'  
 ****  
'I believe so,' Mama said. 'He would have had more power as Chancellor, say, than he might as consort.'  
 ****  
We were silent, thinking of men we never knew, and of deeds whose fame - or infamy - echoed down the years.  
 ****  
 ****  
A little later, Mama called me to her. She was sitting in Papa's study and had various papers spread out across the desk. 'Your father told me that you knew the story of Rudolf Rassendyll,' she said. 'I was angry with him; I was not sure that you could be trusted with that secret, upon whose sure concealment, I need not tell you, stands our Queen's honour and majesty. I am sorry for distrusting you.'  
 ****  
I nodded, unwilling to speak.  
 ****  
Mama continued, 'There is a little more to the story, which your father did not tell you, thinking it unseemly for a young girl to dwell upon. I tell you this now so that you may prepare yourself before reading this.' She picked up a large buff envelope from the desk. 'In here are two manuscripts. The first is by Mr Rassendyll; it concerns the first year of the reign of Rudolf V. I think your English is probably good enough to manage it, but ask me if anything puzzles you. The second is your father's account of the deaths of Rudolf V. Take these, and read them. The Queen herself asks that you know what lies within – but none other ever may.'  
 ****  
'My brothers?' I croaked, deeply moved.  
 ****  
Mama shook her head. 'You must not tell even them. They would not understand how easily, through no fault of her own, the sheen is knocked from a woman's reputation.'  
 ****  
I nodded gravely and took the envelope from her, and left her swearing that I would never tell. On that at least I kept my word, but there is more than one way to betray one's country.  
 ****  
 ****  
After Papa's death everything changed, and nothing did. Every day, Mama and I went to the palace; every day, Heinrich and Leopold came to visit us; Karl went back to school, and wrote to us every day. Underlying all of it was a grief that none of us could express.  
 ****  
I found myself possessed by a strange listlessness. Up until now I had been happy to take life as it came, to seize such opportunities and excitements as were offered, and not to seek them out for myself unless particularly bored – and I had not been particularly bored since my schooldays. Now this seemed insufficient. Sometimes I drifted around the house like an unquiet spirit. I stayed up until the small hours, first ploughing through Mr Rassendyll's manuscript with the English dictionary at my side, then devouring Papa's. At other times, I could not endure to be muffled in crepe one moment longer.  
 ****  
Death had my family in his thrall - but I wanted life! I knew now all too well what eighteen years of peacetime had failed to make me understand: that it was perilous to be close to the Queen. Well, I would have followed my father's example in a heartbeat, and gladly, but suddenly it was not enough that I should wait for life to come to me. I must go and seek it out.  
 ****  
And it was in one of these moments that I went to see Maria. The Countess von Regensberg, who still gave her a home, seemed surprised to see me (for I was still in deep mourning, of course, and I do not believe that she was aware that Maria and I were such close friends). She welcomed me with gracious kindness, however, and said such warm words about Papa, and such heated ones about the Mittenheimer assassin, that I was well-nigh moved to tears. Maria said little while the Countess was present, murmuring only a few words of sympathy, but at three o'clock she suddenly said,  
 ****  
'Well, Gertrud, we must not keep you from your siesta. You needn't worry; I shall entertain Countess von Tarlenheim.'  
 ****  
'That's most thoughtful of you, Maria. As long as Countess von Tarlenheim doesn't mind?'  
 ****  
I hurriedly protested that I would not inconvenience her for the world, and, with a last word of condolence, the Countess departed.  
 ****  
Maria immediately crossed the room to sit next to me. My heart was beating fast now, for I knew the moment was at hand in which I would test my resolve - ay, and something else. Before she could speak, I said,  
 ****  
'Don't say a word. I don't want to talk about Papa any more.'  
 ****  
She nodded. And, throwing myself across the sofa and onto her lap with a force that surprised even the sanguine Maria, I kissed her with such passion as I had never before expressed. She responded avidly enough, and drew me down closer to her.  
 ****  
'Elsa, Elsa,' she murmured some moments later. 'What a surprise.'  
 ****  
'Really?' I retorted. 'I fear you're merely surprised not to be the one pushing her luck.'  
 ****  
'Minx!' she said. She let a hand drift upwards to the nape of my neck, where she meandered between the loose wisps of hair, and the buttons on my dress. Retaliating, I turned my attention to her blouse, kissing as I went.  
 ****  
I had not seen her in the month since Papa's death; kissing her now was like kissing her at the beginning. Once again, she was new and exciting, intoxicating, and I wanted her very badly in a way that I could not have expressed then.  
 ****  
And she was no less eager, pulling me down to her, kissing me deeply, guiding my hands, my mouth; and at last I was lost in a mixture of pain and pleasure, and I forgot my confusion and my grief, for a moment at least.


	7. A Disappointment, a Departure, and a Duel

'I have heard something very interesting,' Leopold said. He passed a magazine across the table, folded back to the fourth page. Heinrich and I peered at it, mystified.

'At the bottom,' he said. 'Where it says, Millionairess Marries.'

I scanned the column. The Millionairess in question was a well-known Mittenheimer society lady; her new husband was, it seemed, an obscure French nobleman.

'So?' Heinrich said. 'Why should I care?'

Leopold smiled. 'You needn't, except the part that the Grand Duke wants kept quiet isn't in here. This marriage is a disaster for him; to all intents and purposes, Mittenheim is now bankrupt. The entirety of the lady's fortune has gone out of the country. He doesn't just want Ruritania now; he needs her.'

Heinrich was not convinced. 'How on earth can this have happened and not be in all the papers? It seems unlikely in the extreme. We would have heard.'

'They have hushed it up,' Leopold said airily, and nothing we said could shake him.

  
Unconvinced myself, I sought out a more reliable source of gossip than the _Strelsau Bazaar_.

'Mittenheim bankrupt?' said Theresa von Strofzin, demolishing a slice of apple tart. 'Oh, yes; it sounds all too likely. How did you hear?'

I recounted briefly the story from the magazine. 'I don't see why she should have married, though,' I added, 'if she knew it would cause all this trouble. And she must have known. Love conquers all?'

'Perhaps,' Theresa said, 'though there is a little more to it than that.'

I did my best to look encouraging, and she continued. 'Well, she was married to an appalling tartar of a banker with very backward ideas, and he died and left her all his money, but stipulated that, should she remarry, her husband would get everything.'

Theresa always seemed to know everything. Somehow, one never asked how.

'Well, there are young men in Mittenheim,' she said, 'and she could have had any of them for the asking. Nobody thought she'd marry a foreigner, for all that she spends most of her time in Paris. But she's great friends with the Ambassador, and doubly so with his wife -' she lowered her voice to a whisper - 'she would do anything for the Baroness, they say, and nobody thought it was the widow that the count had his eye on.'

I was finding this difficult to follow. 'If the widow married the Frenchman -'

'The Frenchman can restore his mouldering château; a century odd of the Republic has done it no favours. The Baroness' reputation is saved, for I think there must have been some scandal, though Charlotte won't tell me what it was, and the widow earns the Baroness' undying gratitude.'

'It seems an unduly large sacrifice,' I said.

'Well, if love conquers all...' Theresa said vaguely. Then, 'How do you like the Sachertorte? These are the only people in Strelsau that make them anything like the way the Viennese do.'

  
How is it that we know without being told that the affair is at an end? Those thousands of tiny hints that one's lover is cooling, becoming bored? A glance at another woman, an impatient word. One ignores them for as long as and longer than is possible, but there they are, and the day comes, and there is the envelope on the salver, or the knock at the door, and, without having to open either, one knows with chill certainty what the first words will be.

So it was for me, that September morning. I had just put a ladybird out of the window, and was feeling obscurely guilty about it. And I knew. When Fischer coughed and said 'Miss Adler', I knew it was for the last time.

Maria did not immediately enter the room. She lounged against the door frame. 'I came to say,' she said carelessly, 'I'm leaving tomorrow.'

'Leaving?' I repeated, dully. 'But why? Where?'

'I shall start with Paris. And after...' She extended an arm in a gesture that encompassed Europe. 'As for why: I'm wearied of Strelsau. The Countess von Regensberg has given me up as a bad job. I wish to find my mother. I'm utterly broken-hearted at your engagement. Does it matter?'

'That last at least is a lie,' I said, hurt and not a little envious. I would not have minded seeing Paris myself. 'It has been common knowledge since before Papa died, and you are perfectly well aware that there is nothing in it. And I thought you were an orphan?'

Maria laughed cynically. 'Only if one believes my aunt Norton. I don't.'

Intrigued, but still irritated, I persisted: 'Well, what would you say to your mother, if you found her?'

'At the moment that remains a mystery even to me. Wouldn't you agree, though, that it would be amusing to find out? If you wished to come with me...'

'Not while the Queen is so ill.'

'Still the same old Tarlenheim! So devoted! I thought you'd say that,' she said with a smile. 'I might not have asked if I hadn't.'

'Minx! Come in and close the door.'

Laughing, she complied. And, for all that she had just stated her intention of deserting me for a mere whim, for all that she would almost certainly not be faithful to me as I almost certainly would to her, for all that I was more than half in love with her even now, I could not help laughing myself.

'You will at least grant me a farewell kiss?'

'I wouldn't have asked you to shut the door if I hadn't intended to do so.' And for one last time I took her in my arms.

  
Some time later she said, languidly, 'I must say, you've been remarkably cool about my going. One might almost think you didn't care.'

'I might say the same to you,' I retorted without heat, 'except I know you don't care.'

'Oh, Elsa, Elsa. Have you such a low opinion of me after all these years?'

'Of course. I know you better than anyone, and don't you forget it. And I don't forget that I hardly know you at all for all that. I shall miss you – for you're right; Strelsau is a dull city – but I'm hardly likely,' I finished, 'to seek solace in the arms of Faithful Janetta.'

Maria laughed. 'Dare I ask who Faithful Janetta might be? I don't know the lady.'

'Did you never listen at school? There is a legend; it was one of Sister Paulina's favourites. Faithful Janetta was a servant in a great house in Strelsau in the bad old days and, being falsely accused and convicted of theft, was sentenced to execution by means of suspension beneath the Great Bridge in the height of the winter floods. In some versions she is bound to the central pier of the bridge with her own hair, and they show tourists the iron ring where she's said to have been tied. Well, the floods came, and left the Great Bridge standing, but further downstream, where the great family was rashly attempting to cross, the bridges were swept away.

'As for Faithful Janetta, she was never seen again, dead or alive. She might, I suppose, have escaped from the waters somehow, and prevailed upon some kind soul to take her in, or she might have been drowned and her body swept out to sea. But Ruritanian legend says that she's still there, living in the waters of the Elbe, and she takes to her arms anyone who cares to jump. Disappointed lovers. Ruined merchants. Girls in trouble. Faithful Janetta takes them all and keeps them safe from the world.'

'You stay clear of her. Hide from the world? Not for me! I prefer to go out and find it.'

And, laughing, she left me with a kiss.

  
If my reader has gleaned from my description of Maria's departure the impression that I was indifferent, let me correct that misapprehension immediately. I cared terribly, but since it was now second nature to conceal my feelings even to my closest companions, I had grown out of the habit of revealing them and it is a struggle now to set them down on paper. Though I have set down the scene as well as I can remember it, it does not tell the whole tale, for the simple reason that I was too proud to let _her_ know how I felt.

Apart from the devastation (of which I will not speak further, leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions) wreaked upon my heart by Maria's absence, I was much troubled by my engagement to Nikolas. It was, as you may imagine, no easy situation. With my lover gone, the risk of discovery faded into insignificance. If I did nothing, every day brought us closer to a _mariage de convenance_ that would have been vastly inconvenient to both of us; if I broke off the engagement, I threw suspicion on my fiancé. This last was unthinkable; his position was a dangerous one, and, I thought then, I would die before I betrayed my name, my country, or a friend. Faced with this quandary, I did all that I could do: I prayed.

I leave it to those more pious than me to tell whether or not my prayers were answered. Certainly the situation was resolved; and equally certainly I would, for Nikolas' sake, have chosen almost any other method of resolution, though what that might have been I am, even now, unable to suggest.

In short, then, Nikolas was not quite discreet enough, and the good Baron ---, having been, up until this point, happily ignorant of the Baroness' proclivities, happened to return home to find a scene that could have but one explanation, and challenged him to a duel.

  
Nikolas managed to see me before the news went all around the court, and to warn me of what was coming. I was horrified, but there was nothing I could do, short of tattling to the Queen and having her stop it, and that would never have done. Nikolas would have been furious.

'It's between me and the Baron,' he said, and I quite understood.

'Does Heinz know?' I asked.

'Not yet. He will, though,' Nikolas said grimly. 'He will.'

Shortly afterwards, Heinrich came home in a towering fury. Finding Nikolas chatting to me as if nothing were out of the ordinary, he threw him out with small ceremony. Had the situation not been so serious I would have laughed. My brother and my friend, at loggerheads over an insult to my honour in which I was fully complicit.

Of course, Nikolas could not ask Heinz to be his second, and that, as you may imagine, saddened me more than anything.

  
I should note that duelling was outlawed in the kingdom; the prohibition was one of the Queen's first acts upon her accession. This did not mean, of course, that the populace immediately ceased the practice; they were simply obliged to be more discreet. Nobody fought in Strelsau any more - it was forbidden to carry a firearm - but there was a convenient copse a few miles outside the city walls. The insulted and the offenders convened there to settle their disputes, and the law usually turned a blind eye.

If Heinrich would not stand by Nikolas, then I would. By dint of subtle questioning I ascertained the time of the appointment; the place I had little trouble guessing. I made some excuse, left the palace early, and hurried to the little wood. I make no pretence of any skill with firearms, you understand, and I could hardly have stood as second even had I been so gifted, but I could not bear to stay away. (Later, when the story went around Strelsau, this was judged romantic proof of my devotion to my faithless lover. Neither of us troubled to correct this misapprehension, I being motivated by self-preservation, and Nikolas by generosity of spirit.)

I arrived at the spot, then, at about half past two in the afternoon, when all good citizens of Strelsau were sleeping off the effects of their luncheon. The most that an illegal dueller might fear would be a curious woodman, whose silence could surely be procured with a reasonable donation. As it happened, we - they, rather, Nikolas, the Baron and their seconds - were utterly uninterrupted. They were not even aware then that I watched them from behind a broad beech tree, and saw all that passed.

The sun broke through the leaves and illuminated the clearing. Eduard Benedict, Nikolas' second, whom I knew slightly, said in his clear, precise voice, 'At my word, you will turn away from each other, and walk fifteen paces as I count them out. You will then turn and fire.'

Nikolas looked pale but confident. I wondered whether he considered that his dalliance with the Baroness were worth all this. I wondered, too, whether I would fight for Maria, though my imagination failed and I could think of no plausible circumstance that might call for it. Then Benedict began the count, and I was forced back to the present.

'One... two... three...'

I closed my eyes.

'Four... five... six...'

If I were to reveal myself, cry to them to stop the fight, tell them the truth...

'Seven... eight...'

But no. The Baron's grievance was all too real, and it was his prerogative to seek retribution.

'Nine... ten...'

Still the guilt lay heavy upon me. I had profited by the subterfuge as much as Nikolas had; it seemed hard that he should take all the punishment.

'Eleven... twelve... thirteen...'

There was nothing else that anybody could do, of course; they were all gentlemen.

'Fourteen... _fifteen!_ '

The guns sounded simultaneously. My eyes flew to Nikolas; he was on his feet, but reeling... he staggered... he fell...

I could not help it. I ran to him. Somewhere behind me the Baron was cursing fluently, but I cared but little for him.

Benedict was already bending over Nikolas' body. If he was surprised to see me, he did not show it. 'He lives,' he said.

'He's bleeding,' I replied. A stream of red was running down the side of his head, and making a little pool in the dead leaves beneath him.

'A graze,' Benedict said, though he did not sound convinced.

The Baron's second, a whey-faced little man whom I recognised from court, scuttled up to Benedict. 'The Baron's arm is broken,' he shouted.

'Nothing worse?'

'No.'

'Well, patch it up, and take him home to a doctor, for heaven's sake,' Benedict said. 'We must be thankful there's no greater harm done.'

Nikolas, meanwhile, opened his eyes, winked at me, and closed them again. Unspeakably relieved, I could only laugh.

  
No sooner had we recovered from that excitement, than Heinrich announced his intention of challenging Nikolas himself, to obtain satisfaction for the insult to his sister. In vain did that sister protest that she felt the insult not at all, that Nikolas was his best friend and that, whoever came out the victor, that victory would be hollow; nothing would do but another duel.

'Papa would have done it,' Heinz insisted, and I saw that there was nothing to be gained by reasoned argument. If my brother was so intent on doing the honourable thing, the only recourse left open to me was to do the dishonourable thing.

I told the Queen. She was disappointed; she had already levied hefty fines upon Nikolas and the Baron von ---. (I did not, of course, tell her that I had been there when that first duel came off; while there was no such crime in the statute books as 'witnessing an illegal duel', I did not care to stand in the way of her inevitable look of reproach.)

She called Nikolas to her, and asked him to apologise to me. Later that day she called me to her; I assured her that Nikolas had shown remorse enough and more. (I almost convinced her that it was all a misunderstanding, though of course the marriage could not now happen.)

She called Heinrich to her. He has never told me what she said to him, but I believe that it made a deep impression on him. If I knew my Queen, she reminded him of his duty to her and to Ruritania, of her reluctance to lose a good soldier to a petty duel.

Heinz gave me hell for sneaking, of course, but I can hardly blame him for that. I continue to maintain that it was worth it.


	8. Long live the Queen!

As the old year declined, and the nineteenth century drew towards its close, my mother and I were much with the Queen, who grew weaker daily. My brothers, barred from the sanctum which was the preserve only of women and of medical men, devoted themselves to the vexed question of the succession. I took no little interest in this myself.

I notice that neither Mr Rassendyll nor my father dwells much on this issue in their respective accounts of that turbulent episode two decades ago before our current sovereign acceded to the throne in her own right. Mr Rassendyll, I suppose, assumed that her marriage to Rudolf V would produce an heir; Papa, that she would re-marry. It therefore behoves me to summarise, as swiftly as I can, the history of the machinations and posturings around the throne of Ruritania.

The Queen, then, did not re-marry. She ruled alone – and, I may say, well – for twenty years, and began a process of subtle but steady political reform. I don't propose to go into this here, for it is only incidental to my narrative, but I wish to stress that she did much more than mark time between Rudolf V's untimely demise (of which you will know if you have read the two accounts that I have mentioned above) and the accession of -

Well. That was the question. Rudolf V had been the last son of the Elphbergs, and the current Queen was his direct successor by virtue of her descent as well as by her marriage. After her there was no undisputed heir. Had the marriage been successful – I mean, had there been children, as was generally expected – the answer would have been obvious; as it was, the question was opened to all who cared to answer it.

There were three opposing camps. One proclaimed that the Lauengrams were always the next in line to the throne after the Elphbergs by virtue of their descent from Prince Heinrich, and its supporters were all for crowning Philipp, Duke of Elbe, the head of that family. The law, for what it was worth, seemed to uphold this.

A second group held that this was all very well, but the good duke had never managed to govern his estates with any discernible competence, and would be as disastrous a monarch as Rudolf V might have turned out, had he lived. Another argument frequently marshalled against the accession of Duke Philipp was his own lack of an immediate heir. But recently married, he had no children, and his only living relative was his nephew Georg, son of his younger brother, and at present a student in Leipzig.

It was never possible to state with confidence which candidate this party preferred to Philipp of Elbe; it varied from week to week. My brother Heinrich occasionally involved himself with it, sharing the general distrust of the duke's capabilities, and always conscious that old Lauengeram had, after all, committed the unthinkable and scorned the Elphberg name.

For the Tarlenheims had always been for the Elphbergs, and now there were no Elphbergs to speak of, we were, in some indefinable way, lost. We found ourselves applying logic and rationality where once fervent loyalty had carried all before it. As I write this, it seems not such an ill thing, but we were perplexed at the time. 'It is a pity,' Heinrich said more than once, 'that Rudolf Rassendyll had no children before he came to Ruritania. For he made not such an ill account of his time as monarch, and a son of his might well bear the Elphburg duties as well as the Elphburg hair.'

Karl, sixteen and smug, always replied, 'Even Papa wouldn't have tried that more than once, and, in any case, there is no such man, and if there were he would be a Protestant.'

  


As for the third party, they were all for the Countess Luise of Andersheim. She was the great-granddaughter of Queen Flavia's notorious great-uncle Wilhelm. Being thus connected to the prime branch of the family, Luise was the only one of the candidates who still bore the Elphberg name; none the less, her claim was the weakest, since her great-grandparents had not been married at the time of her grandfather's birth, and, despite the fact that they were wed and he legitimised within six months, the Countess' opponents made hay with this sordid fact - which was unfair, really, given that she was far too young to understand it.

There was no harm known of Luise herself, which, considering the fact that she had but eight summers to her name, was hardly surprising. So far as anyone knew, she was a charming and well-behaved child, but necessarily inexperienced in the manners of government, and equally necessarily susceptible to the influence of her so-called guardian, titled properly as Count Alexander von Winterstadt, but known to all as Red Alex - behind his back. This, I hasten to add, was due to his complexion rather than his politics (or, if it comes to that, his hair).

Red Alex was an entirely different proposition from his ward. Ambitious, hungry for power - no crimes in themselves, as any student of Ruritanian history will tell you - but hungry more for the advancement of the Count von Winterstadt than for the profit of Ruritania. His temper matched his complexion, and his rages were legendary; still, a wise man would fear him more in his calm than in his anger. I shuddered to think of him as the power behind the throne.

Mama's opinion of Red Alex was even less flattering than mine, if such a thing were possible, but she judged the threat from him, via the young Countess Luise, to be minimal.

'Ruritania is not stupid,' she said. 'Nobody would want an eight year old queen. And they all know what Winterstadt's game is.'  
Meanwhile, none of us who knew how the succession stood on a knife's edge could fail to remember that there was another man who would dearly love to wear the Ruritanian crown. The news of the Mittenheimer Millionnairess had only lent weight to Mama's suspicions regarding the Grand Duke Augustus' ultimate aims. He had heredity on his side, Princess Osra's Elphberg blood (however dilute) in his veins, and he had the kind of driving ambition that can drive the meanest peasant to a throne. He had, too, nothing to lose and much to gain by an assault, bloody or bloodless as it might be, upon Ruritania. And, as we Tarlenheims had found to our cost, he had followers who would go to any lengths for him.  
Taken all together, none of the three potential claimants made an attractive prospect, particularly when one compared their reputations with the popularity that Queen Flavia rightly enjoyed. The future looked bleak. It hardly seemed credible to me that, when my parents were the age that I was now, there had been two men (three, if one counted an obscure English gentleman of whose existence I had officially been unaware until I was sixteen) and one woman, any of whom could have knelt to receive the crown with little trouble.

'If the Duke of Elbe comes to the throne,' Heinrich was given to saying, 'there will be revolution within three years.'

On such occasions, Leopold would generally retort, 'And if the Countess of Andersheim does, it'll be three weeks.'  
The Queen herself could never be brought to give her blessing to any of the candidates, maintaining that in all of Europe there had only ever been one man fit to rule Ruritania. Later, as her mind wandered in the ravages of her final illness she began to expand on this theme, and Mama and I were much put to it to see that she was not too voluble in front of the doctor. He was, we thought, a loyal man, but whether his loyalty would lie with the dying Queen Flavia or with the ideal of the Crown of Ruritania, if those two concepts once diverged in his mind, we did not care to find out.

In that chill December this was yet to come, however, and for several months the business of government went on in the Queen's absence much as it had in her presence, such were the reforms that she had instituted. Occasionally her signature was required on some paper or other; in such cases, Mama or I would stand by the Queen, her chair or her bedside, along with the minister in question fulfilling the ancient requirement for 'two witnesses of Ruritanian birth and name' as well as a council of fifty or a hundred men. Though her illness caused her great pain, when she knew she had such business to complete she refused all kinds of opiates or palliative medicines that might have eased her – and, she feared, dulled the mind. Besides this concern she wished, I believe, to conceal the seriousness of her condition from all save those from whom she could not hide it.

Such a revelation happened within the first few days of my attending her in her private apartments - a privilege that I had never before enjoyed. A minister of state had arrived with some Act - it may have been the Poor Schools Act; I can't now recall - that only needed her signature to pass into law. I see her now in my mind's eye, sitting up in an armchair, her face drawn and pale, but her eyes bright and alert.

She questioned the minister closely about the feeling among the council - and, in so far as he could judge, the mood among the populace - and listened attentively to his answers. Only then did she lift the pen and sign. But as she laid it down again some pain struck her; she closed her eyes momentarily; her forehead furrowed.

That was all it was, and yet suddenly, for the first time in my life I saw her not as a cool, benevolent goddess in silk robes and pearls, but as a living, breathing human being - ah! but living, breathing, how long? Every day she grew almost imperceptibly weaker; she tired more easily, slept more lightly, drew a little further away from the world. She bore what no human should have to bear, and if she wept sometimes for the pain, the torment of it, if she cried out - but this is not to be told. It is not the story I have to tell here.


	9. The Sceptre of Heinrich the Lion

And, while we kept the full horror of the Queen's condition from all save those who needed desperately to know it, we kept things from her that could only have troubled her. And so she never knew that in the February of 1900, soon after midnight on a Tuesday morning, some one broke into the Treasury and stole the sceptre of Heinrich the Lion.

A mighty piece of work this sceptre was, a mass of gold and rubies, heavy enough to kill a man with but little effort. It had long been a symbol of the contention between Ruritania and Mittenheim, and had been bloodily snatched by the one from the other innumerable times, and equally bloodily recovered, before peace descended in 1430. It had remained with Mittenheim until Heinrich the Lion, in an act more suited to the eighth century than the eighteenth, invaded the principality and carried the sceptre off - since when it had remained in Ruritania and borne his name, and every monarch since had held it at his coronation. Legend held that, so long as the sceptre remained in Ruritanian hands, all would be well - the same legend failed to explain either the prosperous sixteenth century (when Mittenheim held it) or the disaster of 'forty-eight (when the sceptre was about the only thing left in the Treasury), but it seemed apposite enough now.

It was some Mittenheimer, of course - not one of us doubted that. The one who had shot my father had been disposed of, but surely there were others, springing up like mushrooms, scenting a chance to put their Grand Duke on a grander throne. If they could not kill our Queen, they could steal her sceptre.

I cannot tell you much of the search that ensued, how the police and the guard strove to find any clue, for I was not involved. I know, however, that they found nothing, for there was nothing to be found - not so much as a smear on the unbroken lock - to tell how the thief got in, or went out.

What little I know of the official operation comes from a visit from the Prefect of Police to me and Mama a few days after the crime was discovered – not, he assured us with much merriment, because he suspected either of us of having any involvement in the affair, but because of our close connection to the Queen.

'I understand that the Queen is not yet aware that the sceptre has been stolen,' he said. 'From what I have heard of her state of health, I consider that a wise decision.'

'Her doctor advised that it should be kept from her if at all possible; the shock might be dangerous,' Mama agreed, tartly. 'It depends, of course, on whether it can be kept out of the papers.'

'The Treasury are seeing to that,' was the reply. 'They are as embarrassed as anybody. When I visited this morning, I found a neat little notice informing me that the sceptre has been removed for cleaning.'

I laughed, and moved slightly forward in my chair. 'Tell me, what is the current theory as to how the theft was effected?'

'To be entirely frank with you, Countess von Tarlenheim, we are at a loss. When the guards locked up on Monday night it was there; when they opened up on Tuesday morning it was gone. The lock was intact; there are no windows. It is extremely odd.'

'Was there no suspicious occurrence besides the theft?' I pressed. 'I am sure it cannot be an isolated incident; the sceptre's value is as much symbolic as it is monetary. And one could hardly sell it on... But no doubt you have already asked all these questions.'

'We've heard of nothing like what you're suggesting,' the Prefect said. 'However, as it happens, there _was_ an incident the day before at the Treasury. No harm done, and it seems to have had nothing to do with the theft, but it's an interesting coincidence.'

'Do tell us,' said Mama, who seemed as curious as I was.

'There's nothing much to tell,' the Prefect replied, 'but, since you insist: a fight broke out between a couple of tourists – as you know, there are certain days when the Treasury guard will take parties around to see the Crown Jewels and other objects of interest. It seems there was some misunderstanding between a couple of members of such a party; they came to blows and some of my men had to be called to break them up.'

'How odd!' Mama exclaimed. 'What on earth can they have quarrelled about?'

The Prefect of Police shrugged his shoulders. 'As I say, it seems to have been a misunderstanding. One of the men was a Mittenheimer, and took offence at something the other man said.'

I stiffened. 'A Mittenheimer?'

'Oh, yes, a very odd sort of bird, my men said. Made a huge fuss about his bag – a big leather holdall that he'd left behind in the fight. Well, that piqued our curiosity, of course, so we checked it over before we let him have it, but there was nothing in it beyond yesterday's paper. Sentimental value of the bag, I suppose. Some people are funny.'

'No doubt,' Mama said. 'The Treasury guards, though – surely all this must have distracted them?'

'They swear they didn't leave their posts,' the Prefect said, non-committally. 'In any case, this was all over a long time before the sceptre disappeared. You need not worry, though, ladies: we are following every line of enquiry – and keeping a close eye on our belligerent Mittenheimer friend.' 

  
Less than satisfied with the progress that the Strelsau police were making on the case of the sceptre of Heinrich the Lion, I badgered Leopold into taking me to the Treasury.

'There's nothing to see there, now,' he grumbled.

I reminded him that the rest of the crown jewels, at least, were still there, and worth looking at. 'Besides,' I said, 'half of Strelsau is going now to see what isn't there any more.'

Leopold likes to think of himself as a man of fashion, so this went some way towards convincing him. He paused a little while before asking, delicately, 'I was under the impression that nobody apart from us knew that the sceptre had been stolen?'

'There is a rumour going around,' I told him, 'but the Treasury is denying it furiously.'

'Oh! That explains why some of the chaps in the regiment are so doubtful...'

'Suppose we go along and have a look?' 

  
I might, I suppose, have exaggerated the wide currency of this particular rumour; at any rate, there was nobody else waiting for a tour when we arrived at the Treasury, and we were favoured with the undivided attention of two of the guard. While Leopold examined the 'removed for cleaning' notice with minute attention, I glanced around the rest of the Sceptre Room. The rest of the crown jewels were in place; the senior of the two guardsmen gallantly explained the history of each item to me. I did my best to look as if I were listening intently, but was more interested in the room itself than in its noble contents.

'What is the history of that cupboard?' I asked, having patiently waited to the end of the story about Mad King Oscar's Anointing Spoon.

'Ah, now, that is interesting,' my guardsman said. 'Not many people ask about it, but you are quite right: it has its own history. Have you ever been to England?'

I confessed that I had not.

'Well! If you visit certain ancient houses there, you will find, if you know where to look, recesses, cupboards, hiding places! They were introduced when it was a crime to follow the True Faith, when a priest, at the most solemn moment of the mass, might need to be bundled into a hiding place along with vessels and vestments. Ruritania – God bless her! - was never so mad, but this cupboard was built for a similar purpose. This building wasn't always the Treasury, you know; it was once the town residence of the Bishop of Modenstein – not the one who was in love with Princess Osra, the one before him – who disagreed with Heinrich the Lion on many things, not least the treatment of political prisoners.'

'My understanding,' I said, 'was that the Lion's idea of any kind of prisoner was that they took up valuable space, and should therefore be executed as swiftly as possible.'

My guide roared with laughter. 'Quite so, quite so! The good Bishop, on the other hand, thought they ought to be kept alive, and to that end he helped quite a few escape from Ruritania – often by way of this house. If the King happened to call upon him while he was entertaining one of these worthy gentlemen – pop! the Bishop would be working on a sermon, and the runaway would be in this cupboard. We've had it painted so it's a little more obvious; in the old days it looked like another piece of panelling.'

'I have heard,' I said carefully, 'that, in some houses, such a hiding place would have an egress as well as an entrance.'

'Ah! Very likely, but we have never found one here. Nowadays the place is used for storing mops and buckets and such-like. Bit of a come-down, eh?'

I wondered whether it would be worth talking to the housekeeping staff, to see if they had noticed any disturbance within the cupboard; it seemed unlikely that my gallant informant would be able to judge. I could have asked to see inside, but I would hardly notice anything unusual myself, not knowing what constituted the usual state of things.

Concluding that I had learned all that there was to learn from the gentlemen of the guard, I let them show me the rest of the room and prevailed upon Leopold to escort me back home again.

  
I did better with the housekeeper. Fabricating a reference for an imaginary applicant to the imaginary post of scullery maid, and taking advantage of Hilde's genuine sprained ankle, I found an opportunity to visit the Treasury again and talk to Frau Schwartze.

'Gruber?' she said, perusing the reference. 'No, we never had a Gruber.'

This was hardly surprising. I had borrowed the name from the _Gazette_.

'How odd,' I said. 'Perhaps she is using a different name?'

Frau Schwartze snorted. 'Stupid of her, if so. No, it couldn't be one of my girls. Someone's trying it on and hoping you wouldn't check her references. Employed at the Treasury until three weeks ago, indeed! I've had nobody leave since Adelheid married, last July.'

'But you have taken on a new girl, recently, I understand,' I said inconsequentially.

She looked surprised. 'No – no one since Johanna, who replaced Adelheid.'

'Forgive me,' I said. 'My brother – who notices these things, I'm ashamed to say – thought he saw a new girl last time he visited.'

'Not one of mine,' said Frau Schwartze. 'Although that's curious – your brother wouldn't be the first to mention a new girl.'

'No?'

'No – Steiner, on the gate, said he'd seen a girl go out – which was odd, he said, because he hadn't seen her go in.'

'How strange!' I said. 'I suppose he couldn't have missed her?'

'No, the girls only come in the back...Well, she wasn't one of mine, and you wouldn't want her in your house; the police are after her, as it happens.'

'Indeed?' I said, hoping to draw further information, but Frau Schwartze evidently felt that she had already said too much.

'We have to be careful, you know, what with everything we have here, and we don't like to have people coming inside that we don't know about. The police are interested in her for that alone.' And her mouth shut like a trap.

Feeling that I would gain nothing by pressing her, I thanked her for her assistance, assured her that I would employ neither the mythical Fräulein Gruber nor the anonymous girl who went out but did not come in, if she were ever found, and went home, feeling obscurely as if the answer ought to be obvious.


	10. A Face in the Shadows

These were dark times. The gay, peaceable, whirl of life that I had known before my father was murdered seemed like something that had happened to another girl entirely. I had become weary, wary. I felt no particular concern for myself, but knew that my position, close to the Queen, was a dangerous one. Every shadow was a potential assassin; every sound was a killer's footstep. I lived in a state of perpetual tension. Seeing no prospect of improvement, I dreaded any change in the situation, knowing all the while that it was untenable.

The worst of it was that nothing happened. The Queen grew steadily but almost imperceptibly worse; each day seemed more tortured than the one before; the question of the succession was whispered – no more than that – and no positive conclusion seemed ever likely to be reached. I was sick of it all, but I would see no resolution, and as the days dragged into weeks, the weeks into months, I almost learned to ignore that uneasy conviction that I was being watched.

  
Late one night I was returning alone from the palace, leaving Mama with the Queen. Stefan had gone to stable the horses, and I was standing at the bottom of the steps waiting for Fischer to let me in, when a shadow detached itself from the surrounding gloom and laid a hand on my shoulder. I wheeled round with a gasp. A young man stood there, clothed all in black, bare-headed, but wearing a short cape.

'Don't you know me?' he said.

I looked sharply at him. The face was familiar, but -

'Maria!' I exclaimed.

'Hush - you'll wake your respectable neighbours. Now,' as Fischer opened the door, 'aren't you going to invite me in?'

'I'm not sure that I should,' said I; 'however, I'm far too curious to leave you out in the street. Come with me. Fischer, please bring us coffee. In my sitting room.'

Fischer was well used by now to the way that we young Tarlenheims brought home strangers of all political affiliations, and merely murmured, 'Very good.' Somewhat flustered, I led the way upstairs. Once in my sitting room, I could not settle, and so I paced the room while Maria lolled in a chair and watched me with insolent amusement.

'Well,' she said, when Fischer had been and gone, 'you said you were curious?'

'Indeed I am!' I flung my cloak across the back of a sofa, sat down, and poured the coffee. I didn't bother to ask if Maria's tastes had changed during her wanderings, but made hers strong and black, with half a spoon of sugar. In my distraction I poured my own rather fuller than usual. 'How were your travels? Why have you come back now? And why the - unconventional garb?'

She fascinated me more now than ever before. Her hair had been cut short; a few curls fell over her eyes. In breeches, her legs seemed longer than they had in skirts...

'Oh, they're all wearing it in Paris, my dear,' she said.

I raised my eyebrows.

'Very well, then. I felt that Maria Adler had seen enough of Strelsau - or, perhaps, vice versa. And a certain conversation with my mother made me rather curious as to whether I could wear this without remark.'

'Your mother! You found her, then?'

'I did. It was easier than I'd imagined it might be.'

'Who is she? How did you find her?'

Maria smiled. 'You have met her. Or, if not precisely met her, then seen her.'

I thought of all the women in Ruritania whose ages I judged to be between thirty-five and sixty. It could have been any of them. I had even met the last Eschenbauer sister, the only one who had not married and settled elsewhere in Europe, though she seemed an unlikely candidate.

'When I first came to the convent...' she prompted.

I remembered that first sight of Maria, and, with her, far less interesting, a tall, stately lady. 'Mrs Norton! But that was your aunt! I thought your mother was Ruritanian.'

She shook her head. 'It seems not. I went to Paris - they keep a house there, you know; she and her husband - and I walked in, and I refused to leave until she told me the truth. And so she did.'

'Is your father Mr Norton, then?' I asked.

'So naive!' Maria looked at me sideways, teasing. 'Of course not; why would they have given me a different name and sent me off to school if he had been? No, it seems that I am at least a Ruritanian.'

'Who?' I asked.

She drained her cup before she answered. 'Are you not more interested in my mother?'

'But I know who she was,' I objected, impatient.

'No. You only know who she _is_. It's before your time, of course, but my mother was a singer. American. That part is true, as well, except it isn't. She sang at the Opera House here once upon a time, in the 'seventies. Cherubino. Orlofsky. Siebel. Carmen. Eboli. Your mother will remember her. Irene Adler.'

I knew the name. 'What happened to her?'

'She retired; she married; she left her past behind.'

'And you?'

'I? I was her past.' There was no one like Maria when she chose to be infuriating.

'When she was singing in Strelsau?' I persisted.

'Come and sit beside me, and I'll tell you,' she said.

I knew what would be the end of that, and yet I rose without a murmur - still, all the while I had been waiting for her to kiss me, and so it did not make such a difference.

'My mother, it seems, was singing in Strelsau in 1876 and 1877. My father went to see her once or twice, was intrigued, pursued her. Then something happened. He was obliged to leave Ruritania in a hurry. My mother finished her tour, and went on somewhere else. Berlin, I think. It doesn't matter. My father happened to find himself there.'

She stopped, and absently took my hand in hers. I shivered.

'From what my mother says,' she continued, 'they liked each other well enough, went to bed, and went their separate ways. Utterly civilised, though inconvenient for her.'

'But who was he?'

Maria looked at me in feigned surprise. 'Why, Rupert Hentzau, of course.'

And as she turned my face towards her, and kissed me, I could well believe it.

  
So began the strange second Ruritanian career of Maria Adler, known at this time as Markus von Hentzau. She had no legal claim to the name, of course, but no one ever disputed it that I heard of. The Count of Luzau-Rischenheim, perhaps divining the truth and desiring no further association with his disreputable cousin Rupert, even at a generation's remove, refused to receive her, and that set the tone for all Ruritanian society. Had there been a Hentzau living, no doubt there would have been a duel or two to settle this upstart's impudence in appropriating an ancient and (for the most part) noble name. However, the likeness was uncanny, and Rupert's reputation well known, and there was nobody to object as vehemently as all that.

What I had always known was clear now to all of Strelsau: that Maria, no, Markus, rather, had inherited the Hentzau temperament. The daughters of the women who had carried a torch for her father now became intrigued by this stranger with a familiar name. She became notorious, though I believe the secret of her sex was never known publicly. She took virginities but left maidenheads intact, and, I have heard, not a few wedding nights paled in comparison.

And even now, I look at the Countess of ---, and Carolina ---, and the Baroness von ---, and I wonder if they knew, or when they knew. For I was the first, and the least deceived (in that, at any rate) and I knew about all the others, for Maria told me. I listened with a mixture of pain and pride. She was never 'Markus' to me, and I believe that, if she loved me at all, she loved me for that, that I could stroke her shorn head and call her by her own name.


	11. Ruritania!

Maria added to her eccentricities by enrolling at the University of Strelsau. Of all the young men and old men there, nobody noticed that she was a woman. Nobody there seemed to object to her claiming to be the last of the Hentzaus, either; possibly her cavalier attitude to lectures and tutorials seemed all too convincing, or possibly the realms of academia were too far removed from the world the rest of us occupied to have noticed that that distinguished line was now, technically, extinct. In any event, no rumour of her sex disturbed its hallowed halls.

The University occupies about one-twentieth of the area of the Altstadt. Strolling up the Neustrasse (the oldest street in the city, of course) one comes upon it almost by mistake, and then wonders how one could have missed it. Pass beneath the Chancellor's Gate; enter the courtyard. A tall clock tower dominates the little cluster of halls. If you come across it at the right moment of the day you will swear that you have stepped into a different world; some trick of the acoustics shuts out all the noise from the Old Town, and the effect is almost that of a cloister.

Then the clock strikes, and suddenly the courtyard is full of students - yelling, screaming, whooping, as if they were nine years old rather than nineteen. They lodge variously in the ancient halls and in assorted unsavoury rooms around the Altstadt. Maria threw in her lot with them and found a place in the sort of lodging house that Mama would never have let me visit. I visited, of course, and never let Mama know.

It was not so difficult, after all. Mama and I barely saw each other save at the Palace; she rarely left the Queen's side in the daytime, and came home only to sleep. Karl had gone back to school, and Heinrich and Leopold both spent their leisure hours with one political group or another, learning all that they could about the various contenders for the throne and their respective chances of getting it. They seemed to me to have little firm idea what to do with this intelligence once they had discovered it, but, to do them credit, they shared it with Mama and me, and so between us all we knew as much as anybody. Heinrich and Nikolas had patched up their quarrel, but relations between them remained frosty enough that the latter was not party to these affairs of state – nor did he hear them from me, I may add.

Neither of them had friends at the University, which was just as well for me. I was careless in those first few weeks after we resumed our affair. I left the house at all hours of the day and night - indeed, when I was not required at the Palace with the Queen, there was as much chance of finding me at Maria's rooms in the Altstadt as there was of finding me in my own bed. That was not so bad, but I was too often seen, alone, in the old town in attire befitting my rank - and therefore drawing all kinds of attention to myself. It helped, I suppose, that I was so much with the Queen that I was very little in society, and not seen much in the illustrated papers, but even so it is a miracle that I was never recognised - no; once I was recognised, and I was fortunate that the one who knew me had other secrets to keep besides mine.

I was walking home, then, late at night, from an ecstatic evening with Maria. Even mad with love as I was then, I knew it was not considered safe for a woman to walk alone at night in the Altstadt. For this reason I was as wary as I could force myself to be, not knowing whether I should more fear the lighted windows that betrayed my presence, or the pools of darkness between, where unnamed danger might lurk. Perhaps I was too wary: all my senses bent on finding danger, I missed my way. Though by all accounts the maze of alleys was nothing now compared to the hell it had been twenty years before, still it was purgatory to me.

Dark figures passed me in the streets, closely hooded, though the night was not cold. They paid me no attention, for which fact I was devoutly grateful. So preoccupied was I by my own fears that I did not notice for some time that all were headed in the same direction, and all moved with quick yet hesitant steps, as if afraid to be seen. When this circumstance eventually dawned upon me, I wondered momentarily where they were going, but was more concerned with where I might or might not be going myself.

So they passed me, shrouded messengers on some mysterious errand, and so I wandered, footsore and afraid, through the old town of Strelsau. When one of those ghost-like figures crossed the street and laid a hand on my arm, I was hard put to it not to scream.

'It is you!' it murmured: a woman's voice. 'I thought so. What are you doing here, Elisabeth von Tarlenheim?'

The woman turned towards me and what light there was fell on her face. I knew her, and I would not have been more surprised to find Queen Flavia herself out at midnight in an alley of the Altstadt, swathed in a rough woollen cloak.

'Theresa von Strofzin!' I exclaimed - under my breath. 'How come you here?'

She did not answer, but glanced around fearfully. 'You can't stay here looking like that - it's not safe. Here.' She removed her cloak and draped it over my shoulders; she wore the same style of peasant garb beneath it. 'Why are you here?' she asked again.

'I lost my way,' I said. It was no less than the truth, after all. 'And you?'

She regarded me closely for some seconds - I understood, suddenly, that she was wondering if I could be trusted, and the implied doubt cut me to the quick. She said at last, 'I can't leave you here. I can't be late. You will have to come with me, but you must swear, swear on all you hold sacred, never to tell what you will see and hear. And you yourself must not speak.'

I had never heard her so serious. Doubts, questions, raged within my breast, but something about her manner calmed me, told me that, whatever she was engaged in, it was as vital to her as my errand had been to me. Since she was content not to press me about my reasons for being in the Altstadt, it would have been churlish not to honour her request. Besides, I knew very well that I could not find my way out alone, unmolested, whereas - God alone knew how - Theresa seemed at home here.

'Very well,' I said. 'I swear by the Queen's majesty, by Ruritania, and by the Mother of God that I will remain silent while I am with you, and that when I am apart from you I will not speak of what I have heard or seen in your company.'

She nodded, satisfied, and said, 'Come.'

I followed her through the maze of streets. She led me to a narrow house, indistinguishable from its fellows save by the light that burned in a downstairs window. Mystified, I followed. She knocked. A man opened the door; he greeted her as if he knew her, but looked curiously at me.

'Comrade, this is a friend of mine,' Theresa said. 'I can vouch for her silence.'

He nodded. Theresa took my arm and drew me through into the house. A host of questions flew to my lips but, mindful of my vow of silence, I suppressed them. I felt her hand tighten on my elbow, whether in comfort or in warning I could not tell.

The front door opened straight into a room that must have occupied the entire ground floor, such as it was, and served as kitchen, bedroom, or parlour as need dictated. The furniture, all but one table, had been pushed back against the walls, and twenty people or more were already seated. Theresa found me a spot on a bench, but remained standing herself.

A hum of suppressed excitement hung about the room. Curious eyes glanced at me, and glanced away. I drew Theresa's cloak closer about myself, and looked around. Every few minutes the door opened and another person entered, each wearing that same air of furtive anticipation. For the most part they were men, young in years though not in appearance, but there were women, too, and some older men, and a little band of children surveyed us from the banisters. I pondered in my mind, but could think of no explanation of how Theresa could possibly have become associated with this gathering.

The room was full to bursting when the meeting - for such it evidently was - was called to order. A man stood up upon the table and banged his staff upon it. At once the company fell silent.

'Greetings, comrades,' he said, and though he spoke no louder than I might if I were talking to you, and you were sitting at the same table, his voice carried to my corner of the room, and, I suppose, to all the others. It was a harsh voice, and yet one could not help but listen; his clothes were ragged and his hair matted, and yet one could not look away. He was rather as I used to imagine John the Baptist, a man who could level mountains and raise valleys.

'Workers of Strelsau!' he said, and there was a murmur of answer. 'Workers, united! You have come tonight, and I thank you. I know the risks as well as you do; I know what you have at stake, and still you are here.

'I know, too, what you dream of, what you, and I, and every man, woman and child is working towards: a new Ruritania. A new Ruritania, where neither birth nor wealth determines the worth of the human being.'

I started, and felt Theresa's hand on my shoulder, but I had been true to my oath. I was shocked, appalled, even, by what I heard, but even I could not fail to see the amusing aspect: that I had sworn by the Queen's name to remain silent while I heard the monarchy derided! For I knew what this was, and competing emotions tussled in my breast: horror, fascination - and sympathy. I was bound not to speak, but I was not bound to listen - and yet I listened still.

'We cannot put our trust in princes,' he said. 'For twenty years and more Queen Flavia has ruled well; for twenty years and more the lot of the worker has improved steadily and immeasurably. But it is purely chance that has put a good woman on the throne, and chance is too fickle an ally to be trusted. What will happen, comrades, when the Queen has gone to the grave, where all men are equal? Who will rule then?

'They talk, the men in power; they talk, and talk, and look at family trees and ancient laws, and never wonder whether the man whose veins run with Elphberg blood - whoever he may be - would be the man to make Ruritania the country she should be. They never ask the man who ploughs the field or weaves the cloth. They never ask the woman who bakes the bread or spins the wool. Comrades, if you and I laid down our pick and our shovel, Ruritania would stop in her tracks. Ours is the power to keep her running, and so the power is ours to stop her. Why, then, have we no voice?'

I listened, mute and fascinated. Once I risked a glance at Theresa. Her eyes shone; her usual air of bored omniscience had dropped from her, and suddenly I saw how well she looked, in these simple clothes, in the glow of the single lamp.

On and on it went. Others spoke, though none dissented. I was intrigued, confused - but not convinced. I thought of our staff, of the workers on my cousin's estate at Tarlenheim. Did they think like this, I wondered; did they go to bed hungry; did they do their work in silent resentment? How terrible, if so.

At last it was over. 'We'd better go,' Theresa said, and, my thoughts in turmoil, I followed her out into the night. We walked a full ten minutes without speaking. I was afraid to, almost; she seemed lost in thought. Eventually she laughed, and said, 'You may speak now, you know,' as if she expected a comment.

'You agreed with all that?' I said, nervously, for this was an aspect of Theresa von Strofzin whose existence I had never imagined.

'Largely,' she said, looking at me sideways. 'There are details, of course; there always are.'

We walked further in silence. Where the old town began to give way to the new, a brazier smouldered in the street. Theresa stopped to warm her hands.

'The Queen is ill,' I ventured. 'She may not recover.'

'I had heard a rumour,' Theresa said.

I gestured behind me, the way from which we had come. 'That can't be the only group - but even so, there's no way an attempt -' at revolution, I meant, and did not say - 'could succeed.'

'Probably not,' Theresa admitted, 'at least, not at the moment.'

'They say that this succession is a fiasco,' I said. 'Luise of Andersheim is a baby; Philipp of Elbe an incompetent. Who would your friends have instead?'

'Why, a republic,' Theresa said absently. 'But you've forgotten the third contender.'

I had not; I preferred not to think of him, but I did not say that.

Theresa went on, 'If Augustus succeeds to the throne - and his claim is as good as Luise's - Ruritania would become part of Mittenheim in all but name, and Mittenheim -' She shivered. 'I've been there. Mittenheim now is what Ruritania was. It was seeing how the workers are treated there that brought me here.'

'There'll be no republic this century,' said I, not entirely believing it. 'I'd take Philipp over civil war; his claim's the best, and if the man's an idiot, what's that to it? We're safer now than we were when the Queen acceded.'

Theresa looked up at me, ardent in the firelight. 'But don't you see? Philipp would be a disaster! We have the laws, true, but they are new. No one has tried them; they probably cannot be enforced against a determined man. Philipp is an idiot, yes, but he's a determined idiot. He doesn't care about his people; he only wants power. He'd be far, far worse than Rudolf ever was; he'd take us back into the horrors of '48 without any provocation – and he'd be as ruthless, too, in suppressing any dissent. We'd end up at war within two weeks.'

'Who are you for, then?' I retorted, stung, for whatever the Tarlenheims' private feelings on Rudolf V, before any but our sworn allies we were for the Elphbergs right or wrong.

And, though it should have been the first word that came to my own lips, her answer surprised me. 'Ruritania.'


	12. How the Heir Presumptive Met His End

Theresa's estimation of the Duke of Elbe had worried me. I had no great love for the man himself, it was true; nor had I any inflated ideas of his competence; yet, assuming the guidance of wise ministers such as the Queen had gathered about the throne, I had convinced myself that he would do well enough. I had not considered it from the perspective of Ruritania's poor. Theresa was probably overstating the case, I thought; after all, how could she truly know how their life was?

And there he was: the rightful heir. The blood royal should have cried louder than the murmurings of a few cranks, and yet I could not oust Theresa and her strange associates from my mind. When Heinrich mentioned any of the Duke's infinite shortcomings, my misgivings grew; and I had no idea what, if anything, I ought to think or do about it.

The news was in the morning papers a few days later. Philipp Lauengram, Duke of Elbe, heir presumptive to the throne of Ruritania, was dead. An accident, they said. He had been out hunting in the Hauptwald, his horse had bolted, and he had been thrown. He lived a few hours, but they could do nothing to save him.

There were rumours, of course. Some said that the horse had been frightened deliberately. ('A dashed unreliable way of assassinating anybody,' Leopold commented, 'and the Duke was no bad horseman.') Others said that the doctor had been in the pay of – somebody (they never agreed upon whom) – that a bullet had been found in the body. Still others, that he had not been on a horse at all, that the injury said to have been the work of a low branch had been inflicted by a man with a club, and the rest was done by poison.

Just as no one could agree on a means (if, indeed, it _was_ anything other than an accident), no one could agree on a murderer, or upon who might have paid the murderer to do his dread work. To do the rumour merchants credit, no one suggested that the eight year old Countess Luise of Andersheim might have signed the order, but suspicious glances were cast at Red Alex and certain other of her protectors. The Duke's nephew Georg, currently at university in Germany, was judged to be too close to Ruritania to escape suspicion. By far the most popular suspect, however, was Augustus, Grand Duke of Mittenheim – though this was no doubt mainly due to misplaced Ruritanian patriotism.

For that other opinion that I had first heard expressed by Theresa von Strofzin, that to acknowledge Augustus of Mittenheim as King would in effect be to make Ruritania a vassal state of Mittenheim, was gaining currency. The romantics resisted this prospect whole-heartedly – whomever Princess Osra had married, they said, Ruritania was Ruritania, and they would not be subject to Mittenheim (which was half the size and politically insignificant in any case). The pessimists held that, given the current state of affairs in Europe, union with Mittenheim was the only way to survive.

'I think there is more to it than that,' Heinrich said. 'Even leaving the whole Mittenheim question aside, I don't believe that Augustus would be a good ruler.'

'Bringing the whole Mittenheim question in, it's evident that he's not,' I commented, with such vehemence that I surprised myself.

'We are faced with the problem -' Leopold was ignoring me – 'that there is no one in the immediate line of succession who recommends himself as a suitable candidate – either because they are untried, or because they have been tried and found wanting.'

'Furthermore,' I said, 'they compete, in our minds at least, with a Queen we have known and loved all our lives, and with a dead man whom the Queen herself calls the true King of Ruritania.' And, I thought, but did not say, with an ideal of what Ruritania might be, a vision that could not be realised in this world if even Queen Flavia had failed to do so thus far.

  


I might have picked a quarrel with Maria that day anyway – it was hot, and I was jealous, and more than a little frightened – but the woman's cloak, tossed so carelessly over the back of the room's single chair, settled it.

'Whose is that?' I demanded. 'Whom have you had here?

If one believed Maria, she conducted all her society liaisons at society houses. I had believed that I was privileged in being the only woman she brought here, and, by implication, the only woman she truly loved.

'Why, it's mine, of course,' she said, raising one infuriating eyebrow. 'I have been sorting out some possessions for which I have no further use.'

'You expect me to believe that? You wouldn't have women's clothing here, not now you're Markus von Hentzau! Someone might guess something.'

'Who? I can think of no one who wouldn't leap to the same conclusion as you.'

'Well, then,' I said, as if that proved my point.

'You don't know her,' Maria said lazily.

I could not speak for a moment. The virtual confession left me even angrier than before. 'Try me.'

'For God's sake, Elsa. Look at it. Does it look like something that would belong to the sort of woman you know?'

I turned on my heel and strode out.

  


The Duke's death threw all into disarray. Though it was clear that young Georg Elphberg-Lauengram, his nephew by his late sister Klara, was heir to his estates and titles, it did not follow that he was also heir to the throne of Ruritania. The Duke's hasty marriage to a minor countess (prompted, we supposed, by the idea of producing a nearer heir) had only muddied the waters. Consequently, all Ruritania was obliged to wait for several months to see if the good Duchess was, in fact, going to produce such an heir. The most learned legal men applied their brains to the issue, in case something had been, after all, missed. Meanwhile, Georg remained at university (and, Theresa von Strofzin claimed, hopelessly in love with a barmaid), and, separately, Red Alex and the Grand Duke of Mittenheim began to sniff around to see what they might claim.

  


Late one afternoon, as I lay in Maria's arms, talking drowsily of inconsequential things, I happened to mention the death of the Duke of Elbe.

Maria laughed. 'Politics, Elsa? We never talk of politics. Save that for Theresa von Strofzin.'

'It's hardly politics,' I murmured. 'Crime, perhaps...'

'You think it suspicious, then?' Maria asked between kisses.

'Mm... I don't know what to think. There has been so much talk.' I pulled her closer to me. 'It seems absurd to assume either that, simply because the Duke was the next in line to the throne, his death must be suspicious – or that because he was not shot or poisoned in the usual way it cannot be. No doubt the police are investigating.'

'No doubt,' Maria agreed solemnly.

Some while later she said to me, 'You know how one might arrange the death of the heir to the throne, and make it look astonishingly like a riding accident?'

'Mm?'

I do not mind confessing that the Duke of Elbe was, at that moment, the very last person on my mind.

'The great thing is to make it work as a plausible accident, and then to introduce a failsafe, ensuring that the good Duke dies whatever happens.'

I shivered. 'That sounds rather heartless.'

'Shall I say, then, the intended victim? Very well. The next point is that, whatever our intended victim dies of, it must be consistent with the accident. If, for example, they were to find a bullet in him, or even a bullet wound, the fall from the horse would no longer be presumed to be the cause of death, but rather the effect.'

'So?' I was struggling desperately to stay awake, for I knew that Mama would shortly be returning from the palace, and I must be home before her.

'It would be quite simple. One would determine the likely route that the victim would take – through a wood; it would have to be through a wood - then, finding a suitable tree, one would arrange for a branch to be hanging low, rig a tripwire – and then retreat into the tree to wait. The victim approaches, his horse trips, he is thrown. If he is dead, well and good; if not, a swift knock on the head to finish him.'

I shuddered. 'Really, Maria, you speak as though you have applied serious thought to this.' I sat up and groped for my dress.

'Must you go? Well, at least if I'm right I know it couldn't have been you. You don't climb trees any more.'

Smarting at this parting shot, I dressed, kissed her (somewhat perfunctorily) and left. It was some time before I applied serious thought to her theory.


	13. Requiem aeternam et lux perpetua

Georg Lauengram arrived at Ritterbad a mere student of the University of Leipzig, but he left it Duke Elbe, heir to the throne of Ruritania, and with the Elphberg name firmly affixed to his own. When he came to Ritterbad he was not yet wholly sensible of the cares and privileges of his newly exalted station; still, he cut a good enough figure, standing bare-headed before his uncle's bier in the great minster church, courteous at a politic distance to the aunt-by-marriage whom he had never met.

Such were my worldly thoughts as I knelt there beside Heinz, praying for the soul of a man I barely knew, and for whom I had cared little. Karl was at school, and Mama remained with the Queen, so there were only the three of us there; Uncle Sapt had, as was his prerogative as head of the royal guard, had Heinrich and Leopold assigned to special duties, to work with him to ensure the safety of the Queen and her heir. (Mama turned pale when she heard that news, and, had either of them expressed a moment's reluctance, would have put her foot down – but neither of them ever did, and, knowing that she and I both would be honoured to be so appointed had our sex permitted it, let it pass.)

The Bishop, constrained both by the unsympathetic nature of the deceased, and by the need to maintain the pretence that not a shadow of suspicion attached to the death, kept his remarks brief and general. Directly the service was over, Uncle Sapt indicated to Heinz and Leopold that they should go with him to the young Duke, and I, who would not have missed this for the world, clung tight to my brother's arm. Leaving crowned heads and foreign dignitaries to the mercy of their own bodyguard, we clustered around the Lauengram carriage. Although I would not have mentioned it, the last occasion when we shared a coach with royalty rose painfully to the surface of my mind, and I do not doubt that my brothers felt similarly.

The dinner, however, passed off without incident, though the Dowager Duchess was necessarily absent. Later, Uncle Sapt convened a meeting, comprising her, himself, the Duke, and the three of us Tarlenheims. Arranging this meeting was a delicate matter, since she should properly have been kept in seclusion, visited and attended only by members of her own sex, for five months, at the end of which time it ought to have become evident whether or not Ruritania could expect to see a new heir to the throne. Properly, too, I ought to have been innocent of the reasoning behind this edict – but, since I was the only female member of the new Duke's party, the men hastily declared my mere presence sufficient, and I pretended ignorance.

The meeting, then, was a risible sight. A barricade of chairs, sideboards and screens bisected the ballroom. On the one side, the Duchess sat with her ladies gathered around her; on the other, Uncle Sapt, the Duke and my brothers stood around in attitudes suggestive of profound discomfort. A gap had been left in the middle, through which I was handed with great ceremony to join the Duchess and her ladies – before three of those last-named, evidently deemed the hardiest, closed it with a Louis XIV sofa.

Propriety thus satisfied, we began to discuss the business as seriously as we might, regarding the gentlemen over the top of the sideboard.

'You're in danger, my lad,' Uncle Sapt began, addressing the Duke. 'It's a pity there's no question of your going back to Leipzig, but now you're the acknowledged heir you'll have to remain in Ruritania. Still, at least my boys and I can keep an eye on you here.'

The Duke nodded. 'I shall be sorry not to complete my studies; perhaps, if the Queen recovers...'

Uncle Sapt looked at me.

'I'm afraid it very much appears that she won't,' I admitted.

'I see. I had heard rumours, of course, but until these past few weeks it seemed unlikely to concern me so directly. One always expected Uncle Philipp to produce an heir.'

'As may indeed be the case,' Heinrich said, blushing bright red, and bowing slightly to the Dowager Duchess.

'Quite,' said Uncle Sapt, less delicate. 'Which brings me to my second point. You are also in danger, your grace, at least until we know what will be the outcome of your marriage to the late Duke. So long as the two of you are in the same place – well, to be quite frank, I'm surprised nobody tried to bomb the funeral, and eliminate both the heir presumptive and any potential heir apparent in one shot.'

'What do you suggest?' the Dowager asked.

'Well, your grace, with all due respect, you're safe so long as the young Duke here is alive and you don't appear to be, ah, expecting.'

She blushed at the allusion, but nodded. Contrary to my expectation, she was a sensible woman in her middle twenties, not particularly beautiful, but with a certain appeal.

Uncle Sapt continued, 'If his grace removes to Strelsau, but keeps out of the public eye – which will not be remarked upon given the parlous state of her majesty's health – you are unlikely to be troubled, and we will do all in our power to protect him. In a month or so we may revise the arrangements.'

'If you think that's best...' the Duke said.

'By all means. The tricky part, of course, is getting you back there. A royal train, that would be another gleaming target for a bomb. We need to do it surreptitiously.'

Papa always used to say, Sapt is never satisfied with doing anything an easy way if a complicated way suggests itself to him. I suppose it kept us all occupied.

  
The Duke of Elbe was, I suppose, a young man much like other young men, a man for loving and drinking, given to study enough to keep his brain from atrophy, and given to sport enough to keep his limbs from doing likewise, young enough to think himself capable of running a country, and old enough to make a fair stab at doing so. The first two pursuits, however, were more or less restricted by the curious state of pre-emptive mourning in which the city of Strelsau had clothed itself as the grave nature of the Queen's illness became more publicly known. The Chancellor wrote up a pretty document investing him with the powers of Regent, to stand until the Queen had recovered her health, or until a child born to the Dowager Duchess had attained the years of majority – or until he might succeed in his own right.

Being sensible of the delicacy of his position, not to mention the danger to his person, the Duke went soberly about the city of Strelsau. He appeared in public as seldom as he could within the expectations of custom, and confined such appearances to visiting the Poor Schools and the hospitals, such causes as the Queen loved – which did much to endear him to the people of a city that had suffered much from the excesses of Elphbergs of the past, and, I believe, also did much for his own character, which would make him a just and gentle king, were he but given the chance. He engaged a tutor from the faculty of his _alma mater_ , so that his studies at least might not suffer from his sudden elevation, and nobody heard anything more of the barmaid in Leipzig – for the moment, at least.

Diplomatic dinners were subdued affairs, if one believed Nikolas (and matters were by no means improved when the British ambassador, Sir Jacob Borrodaile, dropped dead of an apoplexy, between the soup and the fish); there were no balls to speak of, and I would not have attended them even had there been, and Strelsau was generally a dull place in those last months of the Queen's life – the first months the Duke reigned.

  
Before any satisfactory conclusion could be reached, there was another death - one longer anticipated, and more greatly feared. The Queen, who had held on so desperately to life through these long months of her illness, knowing that Ruritania needed her now as never before, was opening the door, little by little, to that grim visitor whose entrance none can deny.

The Archbishop came, and did all that he could, and went away. Mama sat watchful beside the Queen's bed; I dozed in a high-backed chair behind a screen, snatching what rest I could, though alert to every murmur, every halting breath.

I awoke when the Queen spoke, for the first time in weeks as it seemed.

'Helga,' she whispered.

'I'm here, your Majesty,' Mama said. She might have been holding her hand.

A painful laugh. 'It's too late for that. I need - a friend - not - a vassal.'

'Flavia,' Mama said, reluctantly.

I had thought of rising to go to her side, but now I thought better of it. Mama knew I was here, if I were needed.

'I have done - my best.'

'No country had a better queen.'

'I have - atoned.'

'It was barely a sin.'

The lights were dimmed. I could not have seen their faces even had I looked.

'You have loved me - longer than anyone.'

Mama's voice, very soft and gentle. 'How could I not?'

'Dear Helga.'

Silence, but for the Queen's laboured breathing. The gurgle of water poured from jug to glass. Surely the end was near.

'Nobody else,' the Queen said. 'Nobody else served me so faithfully - stayed by my side until the end.'

Was that a sob from Mama? Surely not.

'It is the end, you know, Helga. I go to him. We shall meet in heaven, where there is no marrying nor any giving in marriage, and I shall be the happier, for that was the cause of all my sorrows.'

Mama said, 'He would have been a good King, but you have been a great Queen.'

'I have fought the fight,' the Queen murmured. 'I have run the race. I have done my best for as long as I could.'

'No one could ask for more.'

'But I could. I would like - to see Ruritania secure. I did not understand - how it rests on me.'

'Hush, Flavia, hush - you distress yourself.'

'Georg is a good boy - but only by virtue of his youth. All I know of him is that he is not Augustus of Mittenheim, and that he has not Alexander von Winterstadt as protector.'

'He will do what he can. You have done what you could, and we will do what we can.'

'Dear Helga,' the Queen said again. 'My dearest, my truest friend.' She whispered something, very quietly, and she slept.

And thus the Queen fell asleep, and that was the sleep from which there is no awaking; I knew, though I could not have told you how, though my mother was silent. I knew, perhaps, by the very quality of my mother's silence - that she was suddenly bereft of all that she had lived for. I let her stay there alone, to weep and to honour the Queen she loved, a few minutes there before I must fetch the doctor, a few minutes before she broke down in tears and I went to her side.

  
Such was the passing of Flavia, last of the Elphbergs, Queen of Ruritania. Her body lay in state in the cathedral, and the dying sun struggled through the great west window and cast pale rays across her pale face. In all ways she was arrayed as befits a monarch, save in one wise: on her finger she wore a plain little ring, which bore this motto: _nil quae feci_. But she had done much for love, and much for honour, and for Ruritania she had done most of all.

As we stood there before the bier, I asked my mother what the Queen had said in those last moments. Mama smiled. 'It will mean little to you, darling. She said: I know now. I know what he chose.'


	14. A Letter from Zenda

And yet there was little room for grief. Though the tears lay still upon our cheeks, the only way to serve the departed Queen was to ensure that her successor took the throne as peacefully as might be. For, though we served the Queen, yet the Queen served always Ruritania, and we must follow her example though our hearts be breaking.

Leopold said: 'If anyone beside the Duke of Elbe wishes to take the crown, they must move fast. The only sensible thing to do is to seize power now, while Ruritania is waiting for something to happen.'

'You forget,' I said; 'no one can be crowned while the sceptre is missing. Whoever holds the sceptre holds all the cards; he can name his own coronation day, and who could say him nay?'

'He'll do well to prove he's got the sceptre without proving he stole it,' Heinrich grunted.

This was, intellectually speaking, a pleasing conundrum, though practically it remained a frustration for as long as we were unaware of the sceptre's whereabouts.

  
And once again I went to seek relief from my grief, my exhaustion and my confusion in Maria's arms. I had been telling her but little of what I had been witnessing; she knew that the Queen was gone perhaps a heartbeat before the rest of Strelsau did, but it went no further than that. Strange as it may seem, while I gave her all my body I kept my mind away from her; secrecy breeds secrecy, and as we were obliged to let no one know of our affair, we kept our secrets even from each other. It did me no good in the end, but I feel that I can almost offer it in mitigation.

And so I had no idea what Maria was planning. I sensed that she was excited, almost nervous (if that were possible for her) but I could not tell why. I wondered if she were planning to leave me again - well, not leave me specifically, but leave Ruritania, and me with it. This was not something that I could very well ask her, for fear of giving her ideas, and so I kept my worries to myself. The best that I could manage was a vague speculation about the future.

'Two years ago we were barely lovers... Two years hence,' I said, 'I wonder where we shall all be.'

'At the devil!' she said.

I restrained myself from asking what she meant, merely giving her a long interrogative look.

'Well,' she said, 'if in two years I have been shot rather than hanged I shall count it a mighty success.'

Had I been less befuddled by love, I might have been more suspicious. As it was, a letter from my Uncle Stanislaus put Maria's strange remark out of my mind.

  
A letter from Uncle Stanislaus was no odd thing in itself; with Papa gone, he seemed to feel it incumbent upon himself to take an interest in the Tarlenheims who remained. He had recently taken to writing to Mama once or twice a week; in this particular missive he wrote that he had once again returned to the family home at Tarlenheim, that he would be delighted to welcome any or all of us there as soon as we could be spared from our sad duties in Strelsau, and - which was the point that had so surprised Mama - the word in the town was that there was once again activity at Castle Zenda. He begged her to let him know, if she were party to the intelligence, who it was that was staying there, for his imagination had failed him.

'Reading between the lines,' Leopold said, 'Uncle Stanislaus would like to know whether he can expect not to be disturbed, or whether he should go straight back to Bereichkastel.'

Never was there a man with such a genius for missing the point! Heinrich was more astute. 'But surely no one's at Zenda? Why, it must be almost a ruin,' he said. 'What exactly does Uncle Stanislaus mean by activity?'

Mama scanned the last two pages. 'He doesn't say. It could be anything from the caretaker entertaining some rustics to a full-scale invasion.'

There was something in the tone of her voice that made me look at her sharply. 'Why do you say that - invasion?'

She laughed. The effect was not convincing. 'Oh, merely a fancy - but - it strikes me that Zenda is not at all far from the border.'

'The border with Germany,' Leopold said, having at last caught up with the trend in conversation.

'Ay, that, and the border with Mittenheim.'

'They wouldn't dare!' Heinrich said. 'Why, it would be an act of war!'

'Really? The Grand Duke, or not the Grand Duke, but two or three of his most devoted companions, with staff to see to their needs, enjoying a peaceful few days in the forest, thanks to the kind invitation of her late Majesty... What? No record of such an invitation? Well, sir, painful as it is to admit, her Majesty's state of mind was not what it once had been... No, Heinz, they would have an explanation.'

'But how can it be that no one has yet gone to investigate?' Leopold pursued. 'Uncle Stanislaus says the town is humming.'

'Why should the Zenda police disturb a distinguished foreign personage on his holiday?'

'But the servants?' I asked. 'The caretaker?'

'Silenced,' Mama said. 'With money - or another way.'

She wrote back to Uncle Stanislaus, thanking him for his generous invitation, and desiring most ardently to know more of the goings-on at Castle Zenda, 'for, as you know, dear Fritz spent many happy times there at the beginning of his career, and it always cheers me to hear more of the place,' and we left it at that - for the moment.


	15. In which the Duke proves himself human

I have said, the Duke was a young man like any other, and I believe that even a saint could not long have endured the programme that I have described without chafing for freedom, or, at least, diversion. (I, at least, am in no position to sit in judgement, for I spent every spare moment in Maria's arms.) At any rate, some four months after his arrival in Strelsau, and two after the Queen's death, the Duke at last prevailed upon Uncle Sapt to let him out of the city.

'One week, Sapt, that's all I ask,' he pleaded. 'Hang it all, you can't expect me to live like a monk, and I'd wager you'd rather have me run wild outside Ruritania than inside.'

After much more of the same (which I was not, by the way, party to), Uncle Sapt gave in, observing sourly that he had thought to have seen the last of such idiocy when Rudolf V was buried. 'And I suppose you had better take Tarlenheim, though God knows where the pair of you will end up.' He meant Heinrich, of course; Leopold was always much too stuffy to be good company. 'And why you can't go to Adlersbad, where they at least know how to amuse a king discreetly...'

'I'm no king yet,' said the Duke, 'and I'm going to Germany.'

'Very well, then, but I won't have you going to Leipzig. Every baker's boy will know you.'

  


Of course they went to Leipzig. Had Uncle Sapt gone with them, he might have stopped it, but, as Heinz admitted to me later, rather shamefacedly, he lacked the effrontery to persuade the Duke out of even such a headstrong course. Indeed, he counted himself thankful that the Duke chose to avoid the Boar's Head and the beautiful Lotte.

'We swore never to meet again,' the Duke said, brimming with lovelorn idealism. 'I set her free, and it could not be fair to plague her so.' And poor Heinz was forced to accompany the Duke on an aimless ramble around moonlit Leipzig, and to hear him enlarge upon the manifold virtues and beauties of the lady in question – which I know from experience is excruciatingly dull to the audience who is not himself a lover, and this is why I have not enlarged at greater length upon my feelings for Maria.

  


They repeated this tedious itinerary on the two following nights, until Heinz, who had no doubt come to Leipzig hoping for the kind of entertainment that one does not describe to one's little sister, longed for some excitement, however tame. The Boar's Head was of course out of bounds, and the Duke declined to visit any other tavern on the grounds that he should be known. Heinz was just thinking wistfully of Adlersbad when the attack came – two footpads, who, as luck would have it, had failed to perceive the precise identity of their noble quarry, but merely went for him on the grounds that the pair looked rich and foreign.

The struggle was brief and ugly, leaving one of the thieves with Heinz's pocket-book and a shattered shoulder (it transpired that the Duke carried a pistol) and Heinz himself with a crack to the head that bled freely and soon had him on the floor in a dead faint. The other man, unhurt, scampered off, no doubt to find unarmed prey; his wounded companion staggered after him – and the Duke was left with the tricky question of how to get medical assistance to Heinz without making his presence known to those who might make unscrupulous use of such knowledge.

  


This was how Heinrich awoke to find himself in between the coarse but clean sheets of the second-best bedroom of the Boar's Head, with the Duke pacing the room, a pretty girl with her ear to the keyhole (Heinz could not see much from his sickbed, but he assumed she was pretty, at any rate; he also assumed that she was the Duke's unhappy Lotte, and he proved to be as correct in the first assumption as he was in the second) and a doctor – the most discreet man that money could buy, and one who had moved but lately to the city – tending to his head.

It has taken me perhaps two minutes to describe this scene; it took my brother five times as long to piece together his memory of the events that had brought him here, and ten minutes more to work out where he was now; and all the while the doctor was taking his pulse and mopping at his head and prodding him for broken bones, so that poor Heinz was quite distracted. But at last he managed to arrange his thoughts in a fashion that made sense, and he sat up with the shock of it.

'Sapt will have my head for this!' he exclaimed – 'but, thank God, you're unhurt, sir!'

'That is your doing,' the Duke smiled anxiously, as Heinz fell back into the pillows, his brain pounding.

The doctor fussed, and Heinz managed to say, 'We must go back to Strelsau, at once!'

'Out of the question,' the doctor said, and the Duke, Heinrich thought, looked guiltily glad. 'You are not fit to travel, young man, nor will you be for some days.'

My brother groaned. He would not suffer the Duke to travel unprotected, but for him to remain at the Boar's Head was to cry scandal. Lotte was perhaps the only soul in Leipzig who could be trusted to keep the Duke's presence secret – but for him to stay near her was fatal. If only he were not in love with her! Heinz thought again of what Uncle Sapt would say, and despaired.

The Duke, torn between concern for his companion and his feelings for the barmaid, seemed able to reach no decision, and it was Lotte who straightened up, rose to her feet, and said at last, 'You must stay here – both of you. You mustn't be seen, Georg – my darling – your grace.' Her voice broke for a moment, but she continued, 'Under what name are you staying in the city – and where?'

'We are cousins – both Tarlenheims – and staying at the Leipzigerhof.

Lotte nodded. 'I'll send Erik for your bags,' she said. 'I alone will wait upon you; I'll make up some story for the master, and you can lay low here until your friend has recovered.'

The Duke, no doubt deeply appreciative of her strategic skills, caught her to him and kissed her. Heinrich tactfully turned to look at the wall.

  


Displaying more sense than I would have credited to him after hearing this story, my brother had arranged for any messages sent to him or the Duke at their alleged hotel in Dresden to be forwarded to the Leipzigerhof. The obliging Erik therefore returned to the Boar's Head bearing not only their various bags, but also two telegrams – one from Mama, and one from Uncle Sapt. The latter was in cipher (for Uncle Sapt was a cautious man, and one who loved a plot for its own sake) and Heinz was hard put to bend his aching brain to decoding it; meanwhile, the Duke tore open the former.

'TARLENHEIM HOTEL DUTTLER DRESDEN COME HOME AT ONCE YOU ARE NEEDED IN STRELSAU HELGA,' he read. 'Why so formal? Oh – she means “you” plural - both of us. And that's why she hasn't signed it with her full name.'

Heinrich nodded absently, engaged in perusing the other wire. 'Good Lord! - you really better had go back to Strelsau. The Duchess of Elbe -'

'What about her? Is she ill?'

'In a manner of speaking,' Heinrich said, probably blushing. 'She – well, you need wonder no longer. You are King of Ruritania.'

Had he been capable, he assures me, he would have got out of bed and knelt to kiss the hand of Georg I of Ruritania. As it was, he compromised by bowing his aching head, and did his best not to be shocked that the king's first conscious act was to kiss Lotte tenderly, lingeringly, with infinite sadness, and without suffering her to fall to her knees.


	16. The Snares of Love

Meanwhile, we waited in Strelsau with growing impatience for the Duke and Heinrich to return – or at least to get word of their return to us. Mama, whose anxiety was doubled by the fact that she had a son missing as well as a king, scarcely slept, and was forever listening for the ring of the doorbell.

Two days passed, and three. I need hardly describe Mama's state of mind, but 'The damn' fools have gone to Leipzig,' Uncle Sapt growled. 'Please God he's not married the wench.'

'Could we wire Leipzig? The authorities?' I asked.

'And say what? That the heir to the throne of Ruritania – nay, the king of Ruritania – may be wandering the city, most likely to be found making sheep's eyes at the barmaid in a filthy alehouse, and could they kindly return him? No, my dear Elisabeth, it wouldn't do. We wait.'

  


The observant reader may have noticed that waiting is something that does not come naturally to me, and so I went to call on Maria – having first hinted strongly to Mama that I was going to see my cousin Theresa. Knowing my moods, she let me go.

'Have you heard the news from Ritterbad?' Maria asked, once she had kissed me into submission.

'We don't discuss the doings of royalty,' I reminded her feebly.

'Ah! That's true.' And she looked at me so reproachfully that it was all I could do not to admit what might, after all, already be common knowledge. But she continued, 'Tell me, then, what troubles you.'

'My brother -' I said, and stopped. For, after all, Heinz's business was royalty's business.

'Your brother? Which one? Has little Karl been expelled from school? Has Leopold been drummed out of his regiment?'

I laughed. 'No – neither -'

'Then it's Heinrich!' she said triumphantly. 'Ah, Elsa, why do you not trust me?'

'No woman ought to trust you,' I said, as she drew me into her arms. 'No, no woman, nor no man either.'

'Perhaps; but I trust you, you know, and indeed, I almost begin to doubt that you love me...' And she sighed, a rare thing in Maria.

'Well,' I admitted, 'Heinrich ought to have come home, and he hasn't...'

'Come home from where, my love?' she asked, and her voice was low and soothing as a dove's.

'It was to have been Adlersbad,' I said, seeing no harm in letting her know this, 'and then Dresden – but the wires haven't been answered that we sent him there.'

She stroked my hair, and all at once I knew how afraid I was. 'Where can he be, then?'

'Still in Dresden, I suppose...'

'You don't believe that.'

'No,' I said. 'He may have gone on to Leipzig – I wish he had told us.'

'Why would he go to Leipzig?' she asked, as if it did not matter, and then, when I did not reply, 'Was he alone?'

'Yes,' I said. 'He went all alone.'

It was the first lie I ever told her, and the last. It seemed to me that she knew it for what it was, and that this perhaps was why she hurried me away.

  


I called on Theresa on the way home, lest Mama should mention my supposed visit to Uncle Christian or Aunt Magdalena. My cousin seemed startled; she had evidently pushed a book under a cushion when the knock came at the door, but was obliged to remove it so that I might sit on that chair. I smiled to myself; I thought myself far superior at subterfuge. The book was by Karl Marx. I knew that name, of course, and I understood both why Theresa had tried to hide it, and why she saw no point in keeping it from me.

'What news, Elisabeth?' she asked.

'Oh, very little,' I said, as carelessly as I might. 'My youngest brother is at home; my eldest brother is in Germany.'

'Indeed! I had thought him needed nearer home. How does the Duke?'

'Well, I believe,' I said, as demurely as I might. 'My brother Heinz, you know, sees much more of him than I – and I have seen little of Heinz these past few weeks. I live a very quiet life these days.'

'Oh!' she laughed – a little nervously, I thought. Struck by her manner, I wondered for a moment if she had formed some attachment to my brother – or, indeed, the Duke. It seemed implausible; still, one never knew.

I changed the subject. 'Tell me, then. What news? I rely on you, Theresa.'

'Well -' She sat up, and fidgeted with the book on her lap. 'Have you heard about the little Countess of Andersheim?'

'Baby Luise? What about her?'

'Scarlet fever,' Theresa said gravely, crossing herself. 'She is not expected to live.'

'Oh! -' I stopped, torn between two conflicting feelings – concern for the poor child, who, after all, could not help her parentage or her protector, and a guilty relief.

Theresa was looking at me with an understanding that surprised me, though I suppose it ought not have done. 'I know. One doesn't like a child to suffer – and yet, Alexander von Winterstadt!'

'If he's red, he's right,' I quoted with some irony. 'Well, at this juncture it ought not to matter – from the point of view of the succession, I mean – but still...'

And, because there was no safe way to continue the conversation, and because Theresa evidently wanted to return to her book, I made an excuse, and left.

  


When I arrived home, I found two developments: firstly, Uncle Sapt had requisitioned Leopold but had not yet assigned him to any task, so he was passing the time by leaning elegantly against the table in the morning room; secondly, a telegram had arrived from the Duke (posing as Heinrich) which, in a transparent attempt to disguise their whereabouts, left out several vital details, and succeeded only in driving Mama frantic.

'The young fools are evidently in Leipzig,' Uncle Sapt growled, 'and there can't be much wrong with them, or they wouldn't bother lying.'

Mama, still reading horrors unimaginable into 'SLIGHT ALTERCATION DELAYED IN GERMANY G TRAVEL ALONE', frowned. 'If only they could have _told_ me...'

'Oh, but Mama, that's impossible,' Leopold drawled. 'Anyway, assuming they're more or less alive and well, surely the question is how to get them home?'

'Quite,' Uncle Sapt muttered.

Mama said, 'We surely have two possibilities: unobtrusively, or with great ceremony. I have no doubt that you will immediately tell me that ceremony is dangerous; consequently, we must do it unobtrusively, and if that is the case then they might as well return the way they left.'

'Well, yes, but, Mama, I don't believe Heinrich is fit to travel,' I put in. 'He'd never submit to staying if he were.'

'We can't have the king travelling alone,' Leopold said, horrified.

Uncle Sapt looked at him sharply. 'Indeed not. It wouldn't be safe. Not with Red Alex's minions swarming across Ruritania, to say nothing of the Grand Duke of Mittenheim.'

'We need not fear the Count of Winterstadt, at least,' I said. And I repeated what I had learned from Theresa.

'Hmph,' Uncle Sapt grunted. 'Well, that should settle his hash. Meanwhile, we'd best arrange an escort for the duke – the king, I mean – damn his eyes!'

Leopold straightened up. 'I am quite ready to go to Leipzig.' He made it sound like Timbuktu.

'You needn't go that far, lad,' Uncle Sapt smiled. 'No, I think the king is quite capable of catching a train by himself. He'll arouse far less suspicion as a private gentleman. You might do well to be at Zenda, though, and join him on the train. Quite casually, you understand.' He glared at Leopold in a friendly manner, as if he suspected him of not understanding what was asked of him.

'Leipzig might be dangerous, or Zenda, but neither will be half so dangerous as Strelsau,' Mama pronounced. 'The king ought to be in his palace at this very moment, and he ought never to have left it.'

'But he did...' Leopold protested feebly.

'If only the Grand Duke of Mittenheim weren't occupying Castle Zenda! The king could very properly be staying there, and we wouldn't need to smuggle him into the palace like the Marquis of Mérosailles and his toasting fork...'

'Smuggle him into the palace? Who said anything about smuggling? Ah, but you're right, Helga. So far as Ruritania is concerned, the king has never left Strelsau.'

'What has he been doing, then?' I asked, while Mama frowned.

'He has been deeply concerned to learn of his aunt's illness,' she said. 'He has deemed it insensitive to appear in public while her life is in danger.'

'Is it?' Leopold asked.

'I believe not,' Uncle Sapt said, 'but she'll oblige us by pretending it was. It'll buy us a few days, at least. Very well, then: you get him to Strelsau, young Leopold.' He turned to me. 'I trust that you and your mother between you will devise a way to get the king into his own palace.'

I nodded, heart in my mouth.

  


It was easy work for Mama, who maintained her iron hold over the palace household, to order a thorough spring-cleaning. It was, after all, the middle of March; much of the palace had not had a proper going-over since before the Queen fell ill, and of course the King of Ruritania would have higher standards than the Duke of Elbe. The place was immediately turned topsy-turvy; everything that could be removed from any other thing was so removed, cleaned, and replaced elsewhere; the furniture moved from room to hall to garden to room; the laundry piled high with fine linen; the kitchens shut down entirely.

In short, at Mama's word, chaos arose from order, and the most observant and the least discreet of the vast army of staff would have been hard put to it to tell when they had last seen the King. Each day sumptuous meals were ordered in from one of Strelsau's finest restaurants. The library and royal study were left untouched by solemn decree, leaving an obvious implication to be drawn.

In amid all this confusion, it would of course be impossible for Mama to leave the palace and meet Leopold from his train. Rather, I would be dispatched to the station and greet my dear brother as if we had been parted for months, not a mere weekend visit to Tarlenheim. I would be delighted, though a little put out, to be introduced to his new acquaintance, no doubt a Herr Johann Schmidt, who would have been commissioned to repair some of the more interesting volumes in the royal library. (I rather pitied Herr Johann Schmidt. Leopold is not exactly a sparkling conversationalist.) We would all three take a cab (at least, it would look like a cab, though the driver would be one of Uncle Sapt's best men) by a very roundabout way through the Altstadt to the palace. Mama would show Herr Schmidt to the library, and well, if he never came out again, the staff would be far too busy to notice.

  


Such was our plan. It was, perhaps, not one of the world's great plans, but it was the best we could do in the circumstances, and it would have served the purpose had not three of us (perhaps more; I am not certain) failed in our tasks. Two failed by incompetence, one by malice, I believe; at any rate, the secret escaped somewhere, perhaps even before Leopold was dispatched to Zenda. I suppose I will never know now.

  


On the morning of the day of the planned rendez-vous at Strelsau Hauptbahnhof I received a note – a plain square of paper with no clue to its sender save that I knew without having to wonder. It read:

_By this evening I will have had to leave Ruritania for ever. I would see you one last time. Come to the sign of the Angel on the Bacherstrasse, next the Frauenkirche, as soon as ever you can. I do not know how much time I have until I am discovered. Ask for Anton._

I tore the note into two, then two again, and dropped it into the fire, then, as soon as I could, made my excuses and slipped away.

I had learned since I first was discovered by Theresa von Strofzin in the Altstadt. I changed into my oldest clothes, veiled my face, and carried a cloak that was still older, so that when I passed out of the new town and into the old I could escape notice. I wore my stoutest shoes, and, remarking that it was a beautiful day, dismissed Stefan and walked.

The clock on the Frauenkirche was striking ten when I came to the Angel. The church is a sombre building of dark stone, and it does not have the jingling carillon of most Ruritanian churches, preferring only the toll of the hour-strokes, and a single stroke on the half-hour. I shivered as I passed through its shadow and entered at the Angel's only visible door.

'I am here to see Anton,' I murmured to the landlord, and a figure shifted in the shadows beyond the grimy window. Maria. She crossed the floor in a couple of strides and took my arm.

'Coffee in my room, please, Josef,' she said. 'My companion takes it strong – but milky.'

I followed her up the narrow stair, along a dim corridor, and into a surprisingly capacious bedroom. 'I apologise for the arrangements,' she said, 'but it was necessary. I'm afraid you'll have to sit on the bed. There's nowhere else. Ah, here's Josef.'

The bed was remarkably comfortable, and the coffee delicious. Maria saw my face, and laughed. 'There's more to this place than meets the eye, my dear,' she said.

'I haven't long,' I said. 'I must be away by two.'

'How so?'

I still found it difficult to lie to her face. 'I have to meet... my brother at the station.'

'Heinrich?'

'No, Leopold.'

'I didn't know he was away from Strelsau. Does he travel alone?'

'He does,' I said, and I know I blushed.

Maria seemed to lose interest. 'Two o'clock? Well, I can't stay much longer than that myself,' she said.

'Why must you leave?' I asked.

'You'll know soon enough,' she said. And, though she had pressed me on my movements, somehow I did not enquire further into hers. I drained the cup; she took it from me and laid it on the floor.

Then she did something I had never known her do before: she laid a hand each side of my face and looked deep into my eyes.

Before she kissed me, she said, 'I want you to remember this.'

I remember it. I remember the overpowering urgency, the savagery of her kisses, the way I ran my fingers over every inch of her as if to commit her to my memory. I remember her laugh of satisfaction; I remember the ecstasy, the euphoria beyond any that I had ever known, as if I had become a cloud and been spread out across the morning skies – and the sudden, crashing fatigue. For I was very tired.

I slept, and when I woke Maria was still there by my side, though she had put on shirt and breeches. One heavy chime echoed from the Frauenkirche.

'One o'clock!' I exclaimed. 'I shall be late!'

'Hush, sweetheart; it's only half past eleven. Sleep; I'll wake you at noon.'

The day was warm; my head seemed made of lead. I slept again.

The next time I woke – it seemed but a moment later - she was gone. I sat up and my head throbbed. The light had changed; it seemed deeper, more golden, autumnal. No, afternoon.

She had promised to wake me. Surely she had only slipped out for a moment. Cold dread seeped in at the back of my mind.

Perhaps she had been surprised by her enemies and had to flee. Perhaps she had been unable to wake me. I had been sleeping as if drugged.

Next to where I lay, the bed was cool.

At that moment, the clock on the Frauenkirche chimed once more. I counted the strokes: one. Two. Three. Four -

And nothing. No more.

Four o'clock. Maria was gone, and I was fatally, shamefully, late. I dragged my clothes back on, fumbling with ties and laces, fighting with buttons, and all the while conscious of guilt and betrayal screaming in my mind, failing to quite overcome a sort of desperate hope.

Nobody stopped me as I ran downstairs and out of the door. They had no need to.

I ran all the way down the Königstrasse to the railway station, though God knows what I thought I could do when I got there. It was already far too late. Nobody was there that I knew, and I dared not ask any official about what might have happened. Defeated, I turned for the palace.

I staggered up the back steps, weary and blistered, and still not altogether straight in my mind. Mama was waiting for me.

'What happened?' I asked.

Mama said with chilly calmness, 'The Duke boarded the train in Dresden. I can only assume that he was still on the train at Zenda; I have had a wire from your Uncle Stanislaus informing me that your brother Leopold was delivered to him at Tarlenheim in an insensible state.'

I started. 'Leopold!'

'Stanislaus thinks he'll do, though there's a nasty wound, and I can only trust him. At Strelsau -'

'Yes?'

'At Strelsau, it seems that the Duke was met by a young man in an academic gown. So says Karl, whom I sent to make enquiries of the stationmaster when none of you arrived here. The stationmaster did not see Elisabeth von Tarlenheim.'

'No,' I said miserably. I held a hand to my aching head. 'No, he would not have done.'

Mama continued as if I had not spoken. 'Karl spoke to the guard at the West Gate. Nobody of consequence came through there, so far as he knows, apart from Markus von Hentzau and another lad from the university, going down to the river.'

'Maria Adler,' I said, wearily. 'Now I see.'

'I'm afraid I don't.' Mama's voice was icy.

'Markus von Hentzau is Maria Adler. She was the only one who could have known...'

My mother looked at me, and in those few moments I saw her read all the shame burning in my face, saw how I had betrayed us all.

'Well,' she said at last, 'heaven be thanked I don't have to tell your father about this.'

I had rather she had hit me.

  


That was a miserable supper we three shared behind the locked doors of the king's study, for all that it was the finest work of M. Antoine of Chez Antoine. Mama ate little, and said less; I, consumed with shame, said nothing at all for the most part. Only Karl was left to burble away. He was not, of course, party to the whole story, but knew enough to have gathered that things had gone badly wrong.

'What I don't understand,' he said between mouthfuls of chicken, 'is why they would leave by the West Gate. It doesn't go anywhere any more.'

I passed him a napkin. 'I suppose you could get to the western border. It seems odd, though; if they wanted him in Germany, why wait until Strelsau? They knew soon enough...'

' _I'll_ tell you,' Karl said, inspiration evidently having struck him. 'We did it in Geography last year. You wouldn't bother with the road any more, not if you were trying to get somewhere, but the river's perfectly good; it's just a bit slow. You could get to Zenda easily, or into Germany, or all the way to the sea, if it comes to that.'

The West Gate. The quays! The railway was killing the waterways; it was slow and expensive to transport goods by water when the railway ran in gleaming lines alongside it, when it showed itself as inferior in terms of both speed and capacity. As for passengers, not even the poor travelled by water any more.

So of course Maria would think of it. Easy enough to pass it off as a student rag; easy for one young gentleman to escort another young gentleman, the latter not in a state of perfect sobriety, down to the quay and onto a barge, to tell the astounded master that it was a bet, that if he could get the pair of them to Zenda there would be an extra crown in it for him...

For of course they must be going to Zenda. Someone must have been there to intercept Leopold. The Augustans had been gathering their resources at the castle, and now, thanks to me and my traitor heart, they could bring a hostage there, too.

(But why, I asked myself, had they let the king get all the way to Strelsau, when they could have whisked him off the train at Zenda? Had some incompetent loon mistaken my brother for the new king and knocked him on the head before he could be corrected? And then, discovering his error, taken fright and delivered him to his uncle? The only other explanation I could think of, though it pained me to do so, was that Maria had specifically requested that things be so arranged, in order that she might humiliate me specially.)

I risked a glance at Mama. She was nodding. 'Zenda,' she said. 'They're going to the castle.'

  


Once again there would be a prisoner at Zenda. And now, with my two eldest brothers out of commission, myself deemed untrustworthy (I could only agree) and enough for Uncle Sapt to be doing in Strelsau, our resources were badly diminished. We drove home, collecting Uncle Sapt on the way, and found Nikolas von Werdenstein in the hall. Had I not been so despondent, I would have laughed – and probably taken him aside and explained the whole sorry saga of my love for Maria. It was the least he deserved,and I regretted that secret had piled upon secret since the end of our engagement.

Mama, however, seized upon him as a reliable ally in the absence of Heinrich and Leopold, and insisted that he accompany her and Karl to Zenda. 'We cannot travel alone, of course...'

'I'd be delighted. But what's the hurry?'

Uncle Sapt looked at Mama. Mama looked at Uncle Sapt. At last, she said, 'No one must know this.'

Nikolas nodded. 'You can trust me.'

'The king has not been in Ruritania these past few days. Today he was to have returned, in the company of my son Leopold. We have heard that Leopold is at Tarlenheim. For this reason, and others, we believe that the king is at Zenda, and, more than that, is held against his will there.'

The only response was a low whistle.

'Heinrich,' Mama continued, 'is unfortunately detained in Germany. I will wire him to come to Tarlenheim as soon as he possibly can. You will see how urgent the situation is.'

'Indeed I do,' Nikolas said. 'Well, I'm at your service.'

Uncle Sapt said, 'Between you lads, you must effect an investigation and, if necessary – and humanly possible – a rescue. If I could only come! but I'm too old for that kind of thing, and there are things to be done in Strelsau.'

Mama nodded. 'If we fail – if Augustus of Mittenheim marches on the capital – General Sapt will be needed here.'

'Oh, you think it's Mittenheim?' Nikolas asked.

'Must be,' Uncle Sapt said. 'Little Luise's at death's door, and there's nobody else with a credible claim.'

'The sceptre, too...' I said – and remembered how I had no right to speak.

'It seems plausible that Mittenheim was involved in the theft of the sceptre of Henry the Lion,' Mama translated. 'According to the Prefect of Police there were a couple of Mittenheimer tourists around on the day that it vanished.'

Nikolas looked suspicious, but let it pass. 'It would strengthen any claim, certainly.'

'Damned frippery!' Uncle Sapt grunted, 'but Ruritania's sentimental like that. Well, once you've found the king, see if you can't find that sceptre.'

Poor Nikolas! I sincerely hoped that at least one of my absent brothers would be sufficiently recovered to assist.

'As for you, Elisabeth,' Mama said - and though she tried to sound as if nothing but motherly concern moved her, I heard the mistrust beneath, and winced - 'you must remain in Strelsau. It's simply not safe for you to come with us.'

I merely nodded. I knew that I deserved this.

'I shall wire Stanislaus and Heinrich. Karl, have Stefan bring the coach around. We start for Tarlenheim tonight.'


	17. The Raid on Castle Zenda

Have you known what it is to have a task in urgent need of fulfilment, to know yourself capable and more than capable of carrying out that task, and to be prevented from so doing by your own guilt and stupidity? I went over and over my own foolishness, in letting Maria know about Heinrich's absence. How could I have failed to see how truly she would guess that the king was with him? And then to be drawn to that stew by a letter a child would have seen through! And to tell Maria all the Augustans needed to know! Why, I had as good as written my brother's death warrant with my own hand.

I tortured myself with a thousand such reflections. My family did not trust me, and I could not blame them. I remained at home in Strelsau, frustrated, bored, and - though it shames me to say it, still desperately in love with Maria. More than once I though of seeking her out, begging her to flee Ruritania with me, leaving the whole sorry mess behind. But she was the whole sorry mess, and so was I.

And so I cannot tell you, at least, not from my own account, of what was perhaps the most significant episode in this curious history. The following account is taken largely from what Heinrich told me some months later, when I was at last forgiven, and all was - see! there I go, ahead of myself again.

  


Mama, Karl and Nikolas arrived at Tarlenheim late that night, and found Leopold recovered and anxious for action. Uncle Stanislaus, no less eccentric now than he had been when his magnificent house served as a base for the most fantastic rescue that never reached the ears of Ruritanian gossip, received them without a murmur, and set the place at their disposal, so that they would only leave him to his studies. Since he plays no further part in this account, we will oblige him.

  


Heinrich arrived the next morning, still somewhat enfeebled by the wound to his head. Mama insisted on his remaining in bed for the whole of that day; meanwhile, Nikolas and Karl rode down into Zenda town, and out as far as the castle bounds. They observed a certain amount of activity, enough to be sure that the castle was occupied by someone of importance, but nothing that occasioned more suspicion than those they already harboured.

Another four days passed in the same fashion, Nikolas and Karl becoming more daring in their exploration, and Heinrich engaging in progressively more strenuous forms of activity, and Mama at last pronounced herself satisfied with his recovery. That night he and Leopold, forgetful of the old saw about discretion, made so bold as to present themselves at Zenda. The door was opened by a Mittenheimer thug of huge proportions, who was evidently no trained footman, and whose presence left my brothers in no doubt of the suspicious nature of the Grand Duke's presence.

'We have come to pay our compliments to Georg Elphberg-Lauengram,' Leopold began, not wishing to get into the business of titles and honours.

'What makes you think he's here?' the man demanded, bristling at the 'Elphberg'.

Heinrich pointed out the heir's coat, which he knew well from their midnight excursions in Leipzig, and which had been tossed carelessly over a baluster. 'He must have been here, or that couldn't be here. He can't have left, or he'd have taken it with him.'

'What do you want, then?'

'To invite him to Tarlenheim for a couple of days,' Leopold said, suave as he might be. 'We had expected him at Strelsau, but he was sadly unable to join us. Since we find ourselves in these parts, however, we thought we might ask him once again.'

'What if he doesn't? Or -' the man's stance became infinitely more threatening – 'what if the Grand Duke insists on your joining us here, instead?'

'We'd be delighted,' Heinrich said, 'but we promised to look in on Sebastian Nados on our way back – do you know him? The captain of the town guard? I fear he will come looking for us if we aren't punctual. A nervous man, you know; one has to be, in his profession. Now I come to mention it, _he_ 's quite interested to meet the prince.'

'When is good Master Nados expecting you?' the thug asked, with a valiant effort at nonchalance.

'Oh, in an hour or so,' Leopold replied, matching his airy mood. Heinrich found it difficult to do likewise, having noticed two giant figures, colleagues, no doubt, of the man on the door, crossing the hall.

'Jakob!' one of them said, and the doorman jumped. 'Why don't I show these gentlemen upstairs? It will be far more comfortable for them to wait there for – his royal highness – to receive them.'

Where Jakob had been brusque, this fellow was oleaginous. Heinrich, not a man given to judging on first appearances, later confessed to feeling an instant dislike, quite unrelated to the unpleasant situation. My brothers had no choice but to follow him up to the first floor landing, followed in their turn by Jakob and the third man, apparently a personage of even fewer words.

Upon being urged to sit, they arranged themselves upon a pair of ugly and uncomfortable overstuffed dining chairs. 'You'll excuse me,' the slimy man said, 'but I must first ascertain from Monsieur Bersonin whether it is appropriate for his royal highness to receive visitors. He has had a long journey, you understand.'

He left them with a bow that was rather lower than strictly necessary, and a whisper in the ear of his silent colleague. Heinrich and Leopold glanced at each other, worried. Each was afflicted by the sensation of things having gone already badly wrong.

A clatter of footsteps in the hall below. A few words in French, then repeated, impatiently, in German. 'The Grand Duke has retired to the castle for the evening... No, you can be finished in thirty minutes!'

Heinrich did his best to glance unobtrusively through the banisters. Three men, besides the one he had already met. Judging from the accent, one must be the foreigner Bersonin; the other two he took to be Mittenheimers. They seemed to be in something of a hurry, though they spoke little; he heard horses' hooves pelting down the drive at a fair gallop before the great front door swung shut.

The hurried departure left Heinrich more uneasy still; were they, he wondered, off to meet the expected military party at the frontier? It is perhaps fortunate that he did not divine the truth; the confrontation he anticipated was daunting enough.

They sat there for some minutes, waiting on the return of their slippery guide. With every moment that passed the sense of mischief became stronger. Once or twice Leopold looked at Heinrich and made as if to speak, but thought better of it. The landing was stiff with the sound of four men's breathing.

When he returned, the obsequiousness had gone, stripped away like a sheath from a deadly knife. 'Enough of this,' he said, crisply. 'The Grand Duke wants you two gone – dead, if possible, but he's willing to compromise on that part.'

Heinrich rose, Leopold only a fraction of a second behind him. 'With pleasure, so you send Georg Elphberg-Lauengram with us.'

'Impossible,' the other snapped.

Leopold's first shot went wide, but it had Jakob diving for cover. The second shattered the slimy man's ankle; he fell to the floor cursing.

The third, silent, man made no attempt to defend his comrades, but lumbered towards the staircase leading to the second floor. Heinrich, considering this a poor escape route, and therefore guessing that his aim was to kill the uncrowned king of Ruritania, dashed after him.

My brother had the advantage of speed, but his quarry knew the place. Twice Heinz tripped on the stairs, and by the time he reached the top the man was out of sight. Another shot rang out from downstairs, but Heinz had no choice but to ignore it and commend Leopold to the protection of Providence. He stopped to catch his breath – and, from the corridor leading off to his right, heard the jangle of keys. He hurtled after the sound and, with more force than finesse, brought the man to the ground.

'You bastard!' the Mittenheimer grunted.

'Oh, so you do speak, then?' Heinz said, before he was thrown across the floor. His puzzle was not how to avoid being killed, but how to avoid being killed before the king was freed. He must surely be confined in that room, or why would the silent man have been opening it? Was he bound? Was he capable of leaving Castle Zenda on his own feet? Heinz threw himself at the silent man once again; they hit the door, and their combined weight burst it open.

The silent man, now cursing freely, turned upon Heinrich, and that was his mistake. He would surely have killed him, but he had reckoned without young Georg – who, displaying all the impetuousness of the violent Elphberg blood, was waiting with a chair leg raised over his head, which he brought down upon his gaoler.

The man was only stunned, but it was enough. The pair of them rolled him into the room, then set to barricading the door with a heavy and hideous chest of drawers that stood in the corridor.

Another shot from downstairs, and an ugly cry. Then the sound of a man's body, hitting a hard surface over and over again. 'Leopold!' Heinrich exclaimed. He dashed down the stairs, the king hard on his heels.

Leopold was bleeding freely from a wound in his shoulder, but looked in considerably better shape than either the slimy man (unconscious or dead, it was not clear) or his companion Jakob – who, they now saw, lay unmoving at the bottom of the stairs.

Heinrich nodded, somehow unwilling to betray his relief further. The young king turned a little pale.

'Only my poor arm, your Majesty,' said Leopold, 'and I trust that any further men we encounter will be as harmless.'

Which was perhaps the most remarkable incident of that remarkable night, being the only time in his life my brother displayed the merest hint of a sense of humour.

  


Leopold's next words concerned the whereabouts of the Lion's sceptre. 'In the keep,' the king said at once. 'They seem to value it more than they do me, or it would be the other way about.'

It was the work of a moment for Heinrich to dash through the modern château - to find the gates locked and the drawbridge up. Leopold's new wound worried him, and he had no idea how strong a force they would find in the old castle. Attempting to retrieve the sceptre as well as the king could only have been disastrous, and so he resolved to leave.

The ideal course would have been to set out for Strelsau at once, but Leopold was certainly not fit to undertake such a long journey, while the king was weak from lack of food, and even Heinrich was shaken. They agreed that it would hardly be prudent, and settled instead for a leisurely ride back across the valley to Tarlenheim.

It was slow going, with Leopold wounded, Heinrich on foot, and the king unfamiliar with the territory. I shall not render it in detail: you may well imagine the inky darkness of the forest paths, the glow of the lights in the town of Zenda far below them, the stumbling progress, the chill of the night. Each one of them was cold, tired, eager only to reach a place of safety. By the time they reached Tarlenheim it was all that Leopold, fainting from loss of blood, could do to stay on his horse, and Heinrich was obliged to carry him into the house and upstairs to where he might lay him on a sofa.

You may imagine, too, the horror that Heinrich felt when, entering the drawing room with his brother all but unconscious in his arms, he found his mother seated on a chaise-longue, pale, but in all other respects utterly calm, a Mittenheimer thug at her either side, and Bersonin's gun to her head.


	18. An Unexpected Visitor, and an Unexpected Visit

Meanwhile I was moping in the house in Strelsau, alone but for the servants, and hardly capable of doing anything further to jeopardise the young Duke Georg's chances at the throne. I saw nobody, but then nobody called; I ate little, did little, watched the days roll past with a kind of impatient listlessness, believing at once that nothing mattered now that my secret was discovered and, worse, I had betrayed my country, and that the task I had been engaged in was desperately important, and that to be barred from carrying it out was torture.

Days passed. I did not bother to count them. At last, one afternoon as the darkness drew around, and the gas lights made little headway against the fog, somebody rang the bell.

I had no particular wish to see anybody, and for two pins would have told Fischer that I was not at home. Still, any diversion was welcome, and I was given no chance to dissemble, for I heard my caller say, 'She'll see me,' and there was Theresa von Strofzin hard on Fischer's heels.

'Theresa,' I said, and did not know how to follow.

'Coffee?' she suggested. I nodded to Fischer.

'Now,' Theresa said when he had brought the coffee and we were alone, 'this is desperately important, and I'm sure you can't have heard, or you wouldn't be in Strelsau.'

I was intrigued, but my lethargy kept me from rising to her bait as I might at any other time. 'Well?' I inquired, with little interest.

'The Grand Duke's troops!' she cried. 'They're moving, tonight!'

I leapt to my feet. 'But that's impossible!'

'Oh, is it?' Her smile was grim. 'You know that I have friends in Mittenheim. I received a wire half an hour ago; I came straight to you. It's a small force, not more than a hundred men, but one wouldn't need more than that.'

'Particularly since...' I stopped, remembering that Theresa knew less than half the story.

'Particularly since what?'

I explained briefly about the disappearance of Georg Elphberg-Lauengram, and our suspicions regarding the whereabouts of the sceptre. As I spoke, the Grand Duke's scheme became ever clearer in my mind. '… so,' I finished, 'were the Grand Duke of Mittenheim to appear in Strelsau tomorrow, bearing the sceptre of Heinrich the Lion, supported by a guard of, say, a hundred men, and with the Lauengram heir nowhere in sight, he might as well hold the coronation on the spot and have done with it.'

'Then it's more serious than I thought,' Theresa said. 'Yes, they're moving, and there's no one who can stop them now. Unless -'

'Unless someone were to stop them reaching the castle to rendez-vous with the Grand Duke...' Now she had me.

'At the border, or at the bridge... It need only be a small group. One or two might do it, if they were skilful.'

'My brothers...' I breathed. 'But they wouldn't trust me, not now. Mama will have told them...' I stopped in a confusion of guilt and shame.

'I'd come with you,' Theresa said briskly. 'We daren't put something this important in a wire, but I've two horses outside. The last train to Eschtenstadt leaves in twenty-five minutes; I have already wired to the Golden Bear to have horses waiting for us there. From there we could make Zenda in an hour. Remember, the Augustans have further to go than we do.'

'You'd come?' I asked, incredulous. 'What about your republic? What's Georg to you?'

'A sight better than Augustus. I'll settle for a monarch today if he can serve Ruritania tomorrow. And never mind your brothers. If you were fool enough to tell them, you deserve everything you get, and if you didn't I doubt your mother will have done.'

I reeled as if from a blow. 'Theresa,' I cried, 'you know? About me, about the scandal, the betrayal?'

'About Maria Adler, Maria Hentzau?' she finished for me. 'I know who she is and what she calls herself now. Oh, yes, I knew about you, and her. The betrayal, I guessed. And there is no scandal, nor will there be one.'

I could only repeat, dumbly, 'You knew...'

'My God, Elsa,' she cried, 'you think I didn't know? How could I not, when I've known you, seen you together, the two of you, for the past ten years? You think I don't know, to the very day, when you ceased to be friends and became - lovers?'

'For you to know something, and not to say so, seems a little out of character,' I said, with intent to wound.

She flushed, but only said, 'That was a long time ago. Has Maria hurt you so badly that you think there's no honour among those of us who -'

She stopped, but all at once I understood, and for a moment my heart leapt, as if I had glimpsed whole new worlds of possibilities. But then I thought of the impossible task that must be brought off, and they faded.

After all, it made no difference.

'Go to them, Elisabeth,' Theresa said. She was calm now. 'Go to them; you are the only one who can reach them in time.'

I looked at her, trying to match her resolution. 'The horses?'

'Outside.'

  


It was the work of a few minutes to scribble a note for Uncle Sapt and pass it to Fischer, to change into my riding habit, to beg a sandwich from Hilde, and to follow Theresa out to the mews. The horses stood patiently; noble mounts they were, the pride of the Strofzins' stables. Without a word we mounted, trotted out along the Niederstrasse, through the Altstadt and down to the railway station.

Travellers were few enough on that foggy evening; tickets were swiftly procured, and we boarded the train. The guard recognised one or both of us, I am sure, but I no longer cared. If two young women of good family took a train together, what of it? I had been careless enough with my reputation over the past months; miraculously, no one seemed to have noticed. Now I was prepared to stake it, along with my life, on thwarting Augustus, Grand Duke of Mittenheim...

Lulled by the swaying motion of the train, I slept. When I woke, I found that Theresa had procured some hot coffee, and that we were perhaps half an hour short of Eschtenstadt.

A thought occurred to me. 'Do your parents know you're running off to Zenda with me?'

'I told them that you were ill and that you needed somebody to stay with you; also that you needed total peace and quiet. They shouldn't come after me for a day or two.'

I laughed. 'As for my family... well, they'll find out when we get there.'

'You think we should go straight to them?' Theresa asked.

I hesitated. I had not thought further ahead than travelling to Zenda. 'I don't much fancy tackling the border, the bridge, or Castle Zenda on our own,' I said.

'I doubt we'll make the border at this rate,' Theresa said. 'We'll be lucky to make the bridge.'

She was evidently breaking the bad news one event at a time. I sighed. 'I don't mind admitting that I'm a little worried about my family. Suppose the Grand Duke has worked out why they have all come to Tarlenheim?'

'If he has Maria Hentzau working for him I would think that entirely plausible,' Theresa said, drily.

'I never told her they were going to there,' I said, hurt.

'You probably didn't need to. She knows you're all in this up to the neck, and if she's at Zenda now, the Grand Duke will know everything that she knows.'

'The Grand Duke will know as much as she has chosen to tell him,' I said, for I did know Maria best, after all. 'I fear you are right, though; she may well have mentioned how fond my family is of Zenda and its surroundings, and the Grand Duke may have decided to visit Uncle Stanislaus on the off-chance they're visiting...' I shuddered. 'The more I think about it, Theresa, the more worried I am. If this is a man who can have the heir to the throne murdered before the succession is even determined...'

'We don't know that he had anything to do with the Duke of Elbe's death,' Theresa said briskly, 'but if you are worried, there's a simple solution.'

'What?'

'Why, ask the Zenda police to drop in at Tarlenheim. I'll wire from Eschtenstadt if you like; the mayor would do anything for Papa. If all's well at Tarlenheim, they can go on to Zenda.'

'Is there anyone you don't know?' I asked in a feeble attempt at humour, but I appreciated Theresa's clear thinking. 'What's the time?'

'About a quarter past nine. Why?'

'Will the Grand Duke's troops be in Ruritania yet?'

Theresa frowned, trying to work it out. 'Not yet; they'll be another few hours yet. We ought to get to Zenda before they do, but it'll be close.'

'If we went to Tarlenheim first?'

'We couldn't do it. We have to go straight to Castle Zenda.'

'Could we send the police _there_?'

'I had assumed that if that were possible your mother would already have arranged it. I don't think I could convince the mayor that encroaching upon a foreign dignitary's privacy would be a good idea.'

'No, you're right. We will have to go to the castle ourselves.'

Theresa turned to me suddenly, and I saw with a shock that she was very scared. 'If the troops are already there?'

'If they're already there, we're lost. There will be absolutely nothing that we can do.' I did not say that I thought that there was precious little we could do anyway.

I never saw what was in that telegram that Theresa sent from Eschtenstadt, but it must have been a work of genius, for it got the police to Tarlenheim. Had I known that, I would have been greatly reassured – though had I known what they were to find there, I could hardly have been restrained from heading there myself.

As it was, we reached the Golden Bear a little before midnight, and we set our faces towards Castle Zenda. The horses were fresh and sturdy, the roads deserted, the moon alternately obscured and revealed by a procession of dreary clouds. Once away from the fog of Strelsau, my spirits had lifted slightly, and now we were riding out of Eschtenstadt, away from curious eyes, and the activity dispersed the lethargy that had plagued me the last week.

Anxiety replaced it. The infuriating knowledge that I could do nothing more than arrive at Zenda as soon as was humanly possible spurred me forwards; more than once Theresa was obliged to remind me that exhausting my horse could only slow us down. It went against all my instincts, and it seemed an age before we saw the lights of Zenda town twinkling in the valley before us.

Now we left the main road and struck east towards the castle. The road from Tarlenheim and Zenda ran around the back, and so we saw the old castle first, a gloomy mass that seemed to hover balefully over the moat (and was that a light in the keep?), before passing around to the front where the new château had been added. Even in the dark I remembered the look of it from childhood summers in Tarlenheim, when Papa used to take us all over the countryside round about. At the sight of that lighted window I reined in my horse. Theresa did the same.

'We had better go on foot from here,' I said in a low voice. She nodded and dismounted. We tethered the horses to the fence and set out down the drive on foot, ready to conceal ourselves in the shadow of the trees if anybody came by.

The castle of Zenda had not been used over much since the events of the 1880s, I knew. The Queen had taken a dislike to it, which seemed reasonable enough, and it had largely fallen out of use. A caretaker and his family occupied the lodge, but, until the Grand Duke of Mittenheim had taken a fancy to the place, nobody had stayed more than a few hours in either the old castle building or the more modern château.

A light burned in a window up in the second floor of the château, but elsewhere it was dark. Dread gripped me. I tried to see as we hurried past whether or not the drawbridge that linked the old castle with the new building lay across the moat, but the darkness and the mist on the water made it impossible to tell.

As we turned the corner of the château I made out a dim gleam around the edge of the front door: it stood ajar, as if it had been abandoned in a hurry.

'We're too late,' I muttered. 'They've gone.' And yet I continued walking towards that light as if drawn by a charm.

Theresa laid a hand on my arm as if to hold me back, then stopped short with an exclamation of surprise. 'Elisabeth, look!'

The dark gravel was splashed with darker patches. Theresa knelt and gingerly prodded one. 'Blood,' she said. 'Very slightly damp. Somebody gave them some trouble, at any rate.'

Only the need for quiet (what of that lighted window upstairs?) prevented me tackling the broad flight of steps at a run. Theresa, evidently convinced that there was nothing for us to find there, followed reluctantly.

The first thing I saw was a corpse. A huge man, lying in an impossible attitude. Not, so far as I could tell in the poor light, someone I knew. I bent to touch his face. Cooler than a living man would be, but not cold. He had died a few hours ago, I supposed.

As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom I made out another dark patch of blood, several feet away from the corpse. I looked upwards and saw that it must have accumulated, dripping, falling from the landing above.

Once more Theresa was behind me, trying to stop me. 'I must know who is up there,' I hissed, and picked my way up the stairs. The carpet was bloodied; some of the banisters had been knocked out. Something had happened, indeed, but I had seen no signs of even a small army being mustered.

Such were my thoughts as I made my way to the first floor landing, where the source of the bloodstain downstairs became immediately apparent – the body of a slim, dark-haired man, middle-aged – thank God – not one of my brothers.

The landing had suffered more than the stairs; it was too dark to see far along the corridors. What of that light on the second floor? I felt my way up there, never daring to let go of the banister. Which room was it? I forced myself to stop, heart beating hard. The light had been nearer the north end of the château; that much I knew. As to which room – I would have to try them all, I thought, and what if they were locked? Time was ebbing away, and I still had no clear plan of action.

And then, looking along the length of that corridor, I saw the gleam of light, the only light, mostly obscured by a huge dark mass. Cursing my own stupidity, I crept towards it, stopping every few yards to listen. There came not a sound – and there was no surprise, for an obstacle blocked the door, and masked any noise that might have emanated from that room.

I could not move it on my own, I knew that. Should I call Theresa? Something seemed wrong: surely no gaoler would close a cell in such a fashion. But I could still see that gleam of light: the chest was not so tall as the door. I stared at it for some seconds before the obvious solution struck me. I pulled out the drawers to form steps, climbed up, wincing at every creak, and at last knelt on the top. I peered through the crack, and at length made out the figure of a man stretched out on the floor. I thought he breathed, but could not be sure. I knew that I did not recognise him. Eventually I concluded that I was wasting time, and joined Theresa downstairs.

'Well?' she said, and I saw that she had been anxious.

'Two men. One certainly dead; the other I'm not sure about, but he can't get out even if he lives. I don't know them. I assume they're the Grand Duke's men.'

Theresa nodded. 'Whatever happened here, it's clearly over. We must go.' She turned to the great front door, but I stopped her.

'Wait. I don't believe that any troops have been here at all. There would have been more of a disturbance – and less violence. A hundred men don't bring a hundred horses up a drive without leaving some trace.'

'I expect,' Theresa said coldly, 'that they sent a messenger, and the Grand Duke and his attendants went out to meet the main body of the troops.'

It sounded plausible, but a sense more deep than logic insisted that this had not happened. Unsatisfied, I turned away from her and began to cross the hall of the château. She had no choice but to follow me.

At the other side the largest and most imposing door stood ajar; a draught whisked around its edge. I tugged at the handle, and the door turned on well-oiled hinges. I stepped through, and found myself in the open air, standing beneath a stone gateway where a narrow pavement jutted out into the moat. Beneath it, I knew, the drawbridge ran, but there was nothing but murky water now.

'There we go,' I said, with petty satisfaction. 'They've all retreated to the old castle. We saw a light on the other side of the keep, remember.'

As if to answer me, another window was lighted on the other side of the moat.

'If they were all here, there'd be more light,' Theresa said. 'It's probably just the caretaker.'

I shook my head. It could not be the caretaker making his rounds, for the light was steady, and there was no movement elsewhere. 'They may have left the Crown Prince here.'

Theresa sighed. 'How do you propose to cross the moat?'

That stopped me short. I had no desire to swim, and the drawbridge mechanism was locked securely.. I looked to my left and to my right – and saw it. 'By boat,' I said triumphantly.

She followed my gaze. 'Do you know how to row?'

'Heinz taught me, years ago. Where are you going?' For Theresa had turned away from me and was striding back through the hall.

'Why, to the boat, of course,' she retorted smugly. 'There's no way to get at it from where you are.'

Remembering why I had hated her so much at school, I followed.


	19. Into the Castle

When it came to it, my rowing skills were not really needed. The vessel being distinctly leaky towards the bows, we both sat in the stern, and I half-punted, half-paddled, across the moat. When we came up alongside the side of the castle I propelled our frail craft back towards the drawbridge by grabbing for one slimy stone after another.

'Where are you going?' Theresa asked.

'I know a way in,' I said. For as I stood looking at the great grey face of the ancient fortalice, I remembered a tale I had read long ago. I explained in a whisper, not exactly lying: 'Papa told me that once upon a time this cell held a noble prisoner, and it was determined that, should this prisoner come to an untimely end within his cell – you understand? - his body would be pushed out of the window and lie forever in the moat. Which fact makes me think that these bars must move, somehow.'

'They may have been put in after your prisoner left, or died,' Theresa said, evidently unconvinced, 'but by all means let's try them.'

I knew better, of course, and I applied myself to finding the weak spots. The bars were hinged; they would swing backwards into the cell, but they were closed at the other side with two sturdy padlocks.

'We can't do much with these,' I said. Theresa made as if to stand up, and the boat lurched. 'Sit down, you idiot! But look – no, don't! - the metal's sound, but the mortar's rotten.' It was crumbling under my fingernails even as I spoke.

'Try and dig the hinges out,' Theresa urged. 'Here -' she passed me a penknife – 'it's blunt, but that needn't worry you.'

I took it and worked away in silence for some minutes. No one had occupied the castle for any length of time since the death of Rudolf V; and why, in these peaceful times, would anyone bother to keep a cell in order? Prisoners these days were kept in the gaol at Strelsau, and, wherever the Duke – no, he was the king now! - wherever he might be, he was evidently not here. Unless – I closed my mind to that possibility, and concentrated on gouging at the mortar with Theresa's penknife.

The hinges were bedded deep, but not so deep that a good hard tug could not free them. I cleared first the bottom one, then (more awkwardly) the top, and then entreated Theresa to hold tight to whatever she might catch hold of while I pulled them out.

An almighty effort – and the bars fell with a crash against the wall, swinging from the padlocks. The boat shot out into the middle of the moat, but Theresa kept her head and the oar, and paddled us back to the castle wall and the gaping window.

I will pass over the undignified scramble that got us into the dungeon. Rupert of Hentzau might have planned to escape through that window, but Rupert of Hentzau did not wear skirts. It took a full ten minutes of pushing and floundering before we were both inside, and at the end of it the boat floated off without us. I did not much care; I rather feared that we would not need it again.

The cell was dim and dank; it was evident after a few seconds that it had not been occupied in years. Anxious to pursue our search, I crossed to the door.

'You'll look very foolish if that's locked,' Theresa hissed, and I could not help laughing. Fortunately, it was not locked. I opened it as quietly as I could manage and led her up the short flight of stone steps to the gateway of the old castle.

'Now where?' she whispered.

I shook my head. 'I don't know.' My memory of Rudolf Rassendyll's story had served me well thus far, but he had never ventured above the ground floor here. 'I suppose we wander around until we find someone... I am sure the king is still here, but you are right -' (oh, how it pained me to admit it!) '- I don't expect we'll find an army.'

'Very well, then,' Theresa said. 'I suggest we find that light that we saw from the other side of the drawbridge.' She swept across the room to where a door stood open and a staircase led upwards, and as I followed I wondered once more why she had come with me.

Castle Zenda was built to foil an invading army, and even we, whose Ruritanian hearts and minds should (I felt, somewhat irrationally) have given us an advantage, found it difficult to find our way around. Not daring to strike a light had we even had one, we were obliged to creep along endless dark corridors, clinging to the walls of twisting staircases, relying on the scant moonlight that filtered in from the narrow windows, or the occasional torch on the wall.

We had been walking for hours (or so it seemed) when Theresa suddenly grabbed my hand. I stifled a gasp, for I had seen it too: a warm, golden light spilling out down the corridor, not the sulky flicker of a dying torch, but something pure and constant. 'Someone's there,' I breathed. 'There must be another room around the corner...'

We crept closer, Theresa still leading. All of a sudden she seemed to have regained that courage and vigour with which she had come to me – was it only the previous afternoon? She it was who first peered around the door, and I was left to guess what that room contained from her reactions: first surprise, it seemed to me, then disappointment – and then a kind of triumph.

'Look...' she whispered. 'We could kill him this very moment.'

' _Kill him_?' I squeaked – and she pulled me around so that I too could see inside.

I had expected to find the king, of course. It had not crossed my mind that the sole occupant of the room, who at that moment was snoring very gently, could be Augustus, Grand Duke of Mittenheim.

  


'You can't kill a man who's asleep,' I said, as soon as I had regained my composure.

'He deserves death,' Theresa hissed, with such venom that I shrank back from her.

'Well, yes, he's invading Ruritania, but we can't prove that...'

'Worse. He's a traitor.'

'A traitor?'

'To the people of Mittenheim.' Her face was grim.

I doubted that Theresa had ever killed so much as a wasp, but her vehemence frightened me. Knowing that I had no chance against her in a political debate, for which we had no time in any case, I said, 'Even if that's the case, he needs a fair trial. Can't we keep him quiet for the moment without killing him? Do you think that we could perhaps restrain him?'

'We'd wake him,' Theresa said. 'I'd wager there's chloroform somewhere in this infernal ruin, but we'd lose so much time looking… No, I have a much simpler idea.'

And with that, she shut the door quietly yet firmly, turned the key in the lock, and slipped it into her pocket.

As a strategy it lacked panache, but it was certainly the most efficient method of dealing with the Grand Duke, and it satisfied my conscience better than murdering him in his sleep – and it is difficult to fight honourably when one is not meant to be fighting at all.

  


Immeasurably cheered by our easy victory, we made short work of the rest of the gatehouse and the old living quarters. We had emerged out onto the battlements and I was just beginning to wonder if we had not, after all, done enough to save Ruritania (for the Mittenheimer troops would surely not act without the Grand Duke's command) when I saw a man – or, to be more accurate, saw the lantern that the man was carrying – crossing the courtyard. No doubt this was an attendant of the Grand Duke, come to wake him and prepare him to meet his troops. Let him once come near that chamber and we were lost.

Theresa saw the danger at once. 'Oh, if I but had a gun!' she murmured longingly.

'You know how to fire one?' I asked incredulously.

'Yes, and, better still, I know how to aim one,' she said.

'Where did you... who taught you...?' I stammered.

'Papa, on his estates – in Mittenheim, as it happens. Still, gratifying as it is to confound your biography of me, oughtn't we do something about our friend down there?'

'Distract him somehow?' I said. 'He probably does have a gun, though... what on earth are you doing?'

For Theresa had cast her hat and mantle to the floor, and was pulling the pins from her hair until it fell around her shoulders in pale streams. 'Help me undo my dress,' she instructed.

Uneasily conscious that I was trapped on the top of what was after all merely a wide sort of wall, with a madwoman who knew how to shoot, I thought it best to do as she asked. 'I take it you have had an idea?' I asked, when I was safely behind her.

'I will distract him,' Theresa said. 'You can go down and take advantage of that.'

I coughed delicately. 'Are you – planning on taking anything else off?'

'No,' she said, sounding faintly scandalised, which was nothing to what I was feeling. 'I think this ought to do the trick nicely. Quick – down to the courtyard!'

Trusting her against all my instincts, I hurried back down to the ground floor of the gatehouse. As quietly as I might I tried the door into the courtyard – not the great iron-studded mass that could be dragged back to let an army pass through, but the hatch set within it. It was not locked – the Grand Duke considered that he had little to fear with the drawbridge back, I supposed.

Despite my best efforts the hinge shrieked as I pushed at the door. My heart pounding, I dropped back – but it was open now; it had swung on some infernal imbalance of its own, and I dared not try to close it for fear of making yet more noise. I glanced around the edge. The man had stopped dead about twenty feet short of the gatehouse, and I thought for one terrible moment that he had seen me.

And then I heard the moaning, and I looked up and saw a pale figure on the battlements.

Now I saw what Theresa was trying to do – saw because she was succeeding. Even I, who had but a few minutes before felt warm skin beneath my fingertips as I unbuttoned her collar, was half-convinced I saw a phantom. The skirts of her petticoat floated, ghost-like, in the wind; her hair waved gently.

The guard stood stock still as if mesmerised, his eyes fixed on that wan apparition. Very, very slowly he began to scream. Now was my moment – but I had no idea how to capitalise on his terror. I realised with horror that he was lifting his gun – he was going to shoot her! - I hurled myself across the flagstones and caught him around the knees, a moment after he fired.

He fell heavily, his gun skittering beyond his reach. Knowing that my advantage could last only a second, I dared not look up to where Theresa had been. I sat down squarely in the small of his back and wondered how I was going to immobilise him before he threw me off. He had a kind of leather bag slung across his shoulders; I did my best to twist the strap so that it tightened around his arms. He thrashed like a dying fish, trying to stand up and to dislodge me in the process. I clung on, digging my nails hard into his shoulders, and he fell back again. Could I reach the gun? No: he would shake me loose.

Once more he struggled, and succeeded in turning over onto his back, trapping my skirts beneath him. Desperately, I reached for his throat and grabbed as hard as I could. He tried to reach my hands but his arms were pinioned by the strap of his bag and all he could do was flail. I wished I had thought to grab something heavy on my flight through the castle; it would have been so much easier to knock him on the head.

Of a sudden, he stopped struggling. Had I killed him? I listened: he seemed to be breathing still. I searched the bag and, to my delight, found a small coil of cord. I used it to bind his wrists together. I stifled a lingering sense of embarrassment and removed his belt, which I tightened around his ankles. A bunch of keys fell to the ground with a clatter. His bonds would probably not give him much trouble when he awoke, but they would do for the moment.

Footsteps behind me. Theresa had kept her boots on, which was sensible. The pavement was cold – besides, she could hardly have managed the three flights of stairs so fast in bare feet.

'Good work, Elsa,' she said. 'I was afraid for a moment you wouldn't do it. Now -' She bent to pick up the keys, then the gun. She glanced towards the prone figure. 'Perhaps we should make sure...'

'No,' I said firmly. 'We don't want to risk somebody hearing a second shot. I tell you what we ought to do: hold the gatehouse and the whole northern block. We can lock the door and keep the Grand Duke where he is – not to mention stopping anybody getting to him. And you ought to put your dress back on: you're shivering.'

'Very well,' Theresa said. She rifled the man's bag for ammunition. 'Yes, you're right: I need pockets.'

At that moment I heard a sound from the other side of the courtyard. As I watched, a door swung open at the base of the keep. 'Someone's coming! Quickly!'

Theresa looked, saw, ran for the gatehouse door. 'What if they have a key?' she gasped.

'I doubt there'll be more than one,' I said, with more conviction than I felt. 'We'll shoot them if we have to.'

She nodded.

And then, like Lot's wife, I looked back, and I was lost. For I saw now who it was had stepped out of the keep.

Giving Theresa no opportunity to argue, I left her to barricade herself into the gatehouse and, as calmly as I might, I crossed the courtyard to meet Maria.

  


'Elsa! What a surprise! Who's that with you?'

'Theresa von Strofzin.'

'You go about with _her_ now?' Maria said with disgust.

'She's much more fun than she used to be.'

'Evidently.'

Tiring of the banter, I asked, 'Where's the king?'

'The king?'

'Georg Elphberg-Lauengram, Duke of Elbe, if you'd rather.'

Maria continued to appear confused. 'He ought to be in his bedroom, on the first floor of the château. If he's not there then I can't help you. There was some sort of disturbance earlier today. I didn't investigate; his grace has more important things to worry about.'

'His own skin?'

'No.' Maria smiled. 'Would you like to come and see?'

It was one of the most idiotic things I have ever done in my life, but I followed her.

  


She took the stairs at a brisk trot. I, impeded by my skirts, found myself panting for breath by the top of the first flight – and still she went on, up and up, never missing a step in the dim light. I wondered if she were trying to kill me by exhaustion.

'It's occasionally a little tiresome,' she said, 'having one's room at the top of the keep, but the view is remarkable.'

I could not speak.

'I did not see you approach the castle,' she mused. 'Nicely done – or perhaps it was when I was sleeping. Anyway, it makes no difference.'

I should have turned round when Maria said she did not know where the king was. I could not help but follow her.

She must have led me almost to the top of the keep before she stopped. The door to her room (for such it must be) stood carelessly open. She took me by the arm, and I shuddered.

'Come and see...' she said. 'Believe me, I shall make it worth your while coming up here.'

O God! I still loved her, in spite of everything. I let her kiss me, trembling – but that, I told myself, was merely the effect of the climb. Whatever her reason for wanting me in her room, I would have followed.

'See,' she murmured, 'isn't it impressive?'

I opened my eyes and, finding that she had turned me to look straight at the single candle, had to blink twice or three times before I appreciated the significance of what I saw.

There it lay, abandoned on a bare table with an empty bottle and a three-day-old newspaper. The sapphires glowed with a blue fire that seemed inborn; the gold glinted and flickered in the candlelight. The pelican on the crest, forever pecking at its own breast, drew eternal drops of ruby blood. I caught my breath. There it lay: the sceptre of Heinrich the Lion.

'The Grand Duke wanted it in _his_ room, of course,' Maria said conversationally, 'but considering everything I'd done for him...' She took it up with an irreverence that bordered on profanity - '… no, my love, you mayn't touch.'

Without my willing it, my hand had stolen towards the sceptre.. Maria swung around and slammed the door shut, turned the key and pocketed it.

'Now we both know where we are – don't we?'

'How did you – how comes it here?' I stammered, reluctant even now to believe the worst of her.

'Come with me, and I'll tell you...' With the sceptre tucked under her arm, she opened a tiny door that I had not seen – and disappeared. Dizzied by her lightning movements, it took me a few seconds to follow her. When I reached that little door, I saw that a ladder led straight upwards. Above me, a patch of starry sky – and, all but lost upon the wind, Maria's mocking laugh.

I gritted my teeth and began to climb.

She was lolling on the battlements as young men of fashion sprawl on the steps of Strelsau cathedral. The sceptre lay across her lap. It made me feel sick to look at her with that great drop behind her.

I was obliged to sit down rather suddenly. Arranging myself cross-legged, as close to the middle of the roof as I could manage, laying the palms of both hands flat on the flagstones, to ground myself, I found that the world stopped lurching about me, and, keeping my eyes firmly closed, I said, 'Tell me, then.'

'I stole it, you know,' she hissed. 'I stole it and you never guessed. I was the youth in red who walked in with the party of tourists, and I was the woman in grey who walked away the next morning, the skivvy they never saw again. Do you remember that cape you found in my rooms? A woman's cape, too plain for you. You thought it belonged to another lover. O, my foolish Elsa, so determined to be wronged! You knew about them all, for I told you! Why were you so bent on disbelieving me?'

I did my best to ignore her taunts and concentrate on her story. 'You weren't the tourist who was taken away by the police, surely?'

'No; I was his friend. While he distracted the guards, I crept into the sceptre room, and concealed myself in the cupboard in the corner. You saw that?'

'I did,' I said. 'So you must have changed your clothes overnight, and taken the sceptre, and walked out. When did you do that? The next morning? No, you couldn't have waited for the guards to let you out. You must have picked the lock.'

'Very good,' Maria smiled.

'So how did you get your clothes in? And the bucket? The cleaning girl had a bucket.'

'And my Mittenheimer friend had a bag. He carried it in. In it were my clothes and my bucket – and another, identical, bag, folded up, with a couple of old newspapers inside. When he started the fight and all eyes were upon him, I took out and unfolded the second bag, left it in the corridor for the guards to find (and him to make a fuss about) later, and took the other one into the cupboard with me.'

'I see,' I said. I looked at her, and the great gaping darkness behind her, and wished I hadn't.

'Then I settled in for the night. They locked up the room at five o'clock, and I was able to come out of the cupboard. I waited until it was dark; the main guard go off duty at eight, and after that there is a single patrol every hour. I changed my clothes and removed the sceptre from its stand. Both went into the bag. I opened the door of the room with a skeleton key, took up my bag and my bucket, and closed it behind me.

'After that, it was simply a matter of keeping out of the guards' way as they did their rounds. At length I made my way to the scullery. Nobody patrolled that – why would they? And who would notice a cleaning woman, anyway?'

'The other cleaning women,' I said.

'Indeed; so I made sure they did not see me. I left as soon as the staff entrance was unlocked. That half hour between leaving the treasury and reaching home was the only dangerous part, because the theft would be discovered all but immediately. As soon as I reached my rooms I changed back into men's clothes – in which I have remained ever since. I should have disposed of the feminine disguise, of course, but fortunately for me you leapt to precisely the wrong conclusion, and my secret remained safe.'

'You admit it was a theft, then?' I asked, seizing on the only part of her narrative that did not accentuate my own stupidity.

She looked faintly scandalised. 'Why, of course. You don't expect me to claim some fanatic dedication to the Mittenheimer nationalist cause? I'm a mercenary. I steal a sceptre for one pretender; I kill a man for another.'

'Whom did you kill?' I asked, though I knew the answer as I spoke.

'The Duke of Elbe – and you needn't pretend the assassination wasn't helpful to your Tarlenheim cause.'

I made a gesture of protest, but there was a certain degree of truth to her claim. 'So, when you told me how you would have killed him -'

'I told you how I did kill him, yes. In the essentials, at least. There were some minor details that I left out, lest they tell you too much – though I rather think I needn't have worried. You were almost wilfully obtuse, Elsa.'

The diminutive was like a slap in the face. Again, I struggled to separate the substance from the taunts. 'You say you killed him for another pretender.'

'Yes.'

'Not Mittenheim.'

'No – the little Countess Luise. Not that she knew anything about it, of course. Her unpleasant protector Red Alex. Such a pity she fell ill; he'd have had a difficult enough time persuading Ruritania to accept an eight-year-old queen, and an eight-year-old queen on the point of death would have been just too much. So he scratched. We could have had a much more interesting time of it, between Red Alex and the Grand Duke. Perhaps Duke Philipp wasn't such a loss, though; he was too stupid.'

Suddenly I was furiously angry. 'How much did they pay you? How much did they pay the man who killed my father?'

'They didn't,' Maria said coolly, 'since he was captured. Careless of him. Nor would they have done, since he was engaged to kill the queen. Your father's death, while useful enough, no doubt, was hardly part of the original plan – as I understand it.'

I could not speak. She continued, mocking me, 'Why are you here, Elisabeth von Tarlenheim? What do you think you can do? You've followed me for a king you don't believe in and you have no idea what to do for him. Why don't you accept the inevitable? I'll introduce you to the Grand Duke and you can swear allegiance.'

'I'd sooner die!'

'Or -' and now she was all charm – 'we could leave all this politicking, and go away together. I know you still love me, Elsa. I would take you to Paris...'

'You asked me once before,' I said, 'and I refused. I thought better of you then than I do now.'

I could almost fancy she flushed. 'In that case,' she said, and now her voice was light and mocking, 'I have nothing left to tempt you with. But perhaps you would like to claim the sceptre for Ruritania. Or are you not worthy? I don't care, my dear. It's yours – if you'll only come and get it...'

Miserable, furious, terrified, I could not so much as get to my feet, and she knew it.

She held the sceptre out over the moat, and it glinted in the starlight. 'You don't want it? Well, I don't much care. Shall I drop it? It's quite heavy... It wouldn't necessarily end up in the moat, you know. There's a little ledge just behind me; it's only about a seven foot drop. It's a sort of roof; you can get to it from the main staircase in the keep, if you're slim enough to get through the window. Changed your mind? Coming to get your precious sceptre? No? Are you sure? It's all the world to Ruritania, of course, but you won't get it...'

And suddenly I understood. My concern was not that the right man should have the sceptre, but merely that the wrong man should not. If young Georg Elphberg-Lauengram was worthy of the crown, then he would win his people's hearts and minds without the sceptre. If Augustus of Mittenheim could not produce the sceptre then he would never take the crown.

All that I had to do was ensure that he never saw it again.

The battlements of Castle Zenda are high and windswept. Taller than the mighty trees that surround the fortress, they say to all the western border of Ruritania: _here I am. Fear me, and think twice before you essay an entry_. Time and weather have worn away at the masonry; stones are loose in the pavement and holes gape in the crenellations like missing teeth, so that it is as treacherous for a defender as it is for an attacker. I was not sure by now what I counted as. The rules of the game had been rewritten so many times that I had forgotten what I had set out to do in the first place. Here, with the wind screaming through my hair, cold stone beneath my fingers, I knew only terror.

And yet I knew what must be done. It was, after all, the only logical solution.

I drew a deep breath. If the sceptre and Maria and I all ended up at the bottom of the moat, no one would ever know what had passed up here, and the sceptre would never be found.

It seemed only fitting for me to go with it, and to drag Maria down with me. It would only be what I owed her.

  


All at once she leapt to her feet and I thought in my confusion that she had somehow divined my plan. But no: her ears, more sensitive than mine, had caught the sound of movement in the courtyard – a moment later I heard it too. The Grand Duke's troops, I thought, here at last. She glanced in that direction, and I, knowing that this might be my only chance, blinded by terror, charged at her like a maddened horse.

Startled, she thrust the sceptre at me in a gesture of defence; I felt its majestic weight transferred to my arms, clasped it as I might a baby – and the next instant I was falling, falling alone...

I realised as my shoulder hit solid stone that Maria had not been lying about that little roof, after all. I would have to crawl to the edge...

Somewhere in the courtyard somebody discharged a shot...

  


I must have lain unconscious for some minutes. As soon as I could know anything I knew, firstly, that the sceptre lay beneath me, digging uncomfortably into my hip, and, secondly, that Theresa was beside me, holding my hand, murmuring, 'Elsa, Elsa... live, _speak_... it's over, you've done it.'

On the contrary, I was somewhat disappointed not to be dead. My head throbbed; my arm was broken this time, I was sure, though happily it was the other hand that Theresa was holding, and a quick and glorious death saving my country had seemed an appealing end to my troubles and redemption from my shame.

Something dripped on to my face. Blood, I thought - was Theresa hurt? I opened my eyes with intense reluctance, and saw that she was weeping.

'Indeed, Theresa,' I said as soon as I was able, 'I am not worth your tears.'

She shook her head. 'Oh, Elsa... I could not have borne it had you died.'

'It would have made life much easier for me,' I quipped. 'After all, I am a Tarlenheim, and to die for our country is the main purpose of our existence. And you will call me a coward, but I will never be able to explain to anyone's satisfaction, let alone my own, how I managed to fall in love with a woman and bring Ruritania down about my ears in the process.'

It was the first time I had spoken of Maria without pain; I could not have spoken so to anyone else, but Theresa had always known and never told, and so I told her.

'It is a brave thing to die for one's country, it is true,' Theresa said, 'but it is a braver thing to live for it. As for Maria Adler, it is not that you loved a woman, Elsa, but that you loved a Hentzau. Have you not thought that the love of women might as well inspire glorious deeds as shameful ones?'

Her eyes shone. She seemed to me then to be half a saint, working on earth to bring the kingdom of heaven - and reaching out with divine love to such a sinner as me. 'Think of it, Elsa. But perhaps not now. You are so tired...'

And indeed, the great task done, I was exhausted. The throbbing in my arm aside, I was perfectly comfortable in Theresa's arms, and with her cloak drawn over me. Sleepless for months, I slept at last, there in the open, and woke only when the rest of them came to find me.

Leopold said, 'It's over, Elsa. You stopped them. We caught Hentzau on the way down. Didn't have much trouble. Theresa von Strofzin is a damn good shot.'

Karl said, 'And the Grand Duke of Mittenheim is in custody. If you hadn't come...'

Heinrich said, 'The guard managed to stop the troops at the bridge, but they couldn't have done it without your warning. Papa would have been proud.'

Nikolas said, 'I don't suppose you would marry me after all, would you?'

But I glanced up at Theresa, and I remembered what she had told me, and I said to Nikolas, 'You deserve better; you deserve someone who can love you as a wife ought to. I'd far rather be your friend.'

And Mama said nothing at all, but squeezed my good hand.


	20. Epilogue: Strelsau Bridge

I woke with exultation in my heart, knowing that today was the crown of all our hopes. The morning air was fresh, the sky cloudless. The King slept in the palace, the bells were ringing to wake the city, and Ruritania was standing on the threshold of another golden age.

Even at this early hour, the streets were thronged with people. When we were half a mile short of the prison we were obliged to leave our carriage, for the road was impassable – and the mood, which in the Neustadt had been one of joyful expectation, was fearful.

'What's the matter?' my mother asked a bystander as she was handed down from the carriage.

'Haven't you heard, ma'am? There's been an escape!'

'Young Hentzau!,' somebody else put in. 'He's out, God knows how.'

I turned and met Heinrich's anxious eyes. His thoughts were evidently much like mine: could Maria, even now, do something to prevent the coronation?

Mama surveyed the scene. The crowd had already closed in behind our carriage.

'The police are after him, of course?' she asked.

'Oh yes, and the guard; directly they found he was gone.'

'In which case,' Mama said, gathering us up like a hen with chicks, 'we had better get to the cathedral. It isn't far to walk. Not seemly, I know, but this is an emergency; our first duty is to get to the King. Karl, you ought to be helping your sister down from the carriage even if she had the use of both arms. Where are your manners? Never mind your frock, Elsa; that's the least of our worries. There's very little we can do here.'

We could only agree, and were obliged to continue on foot, towards the cathedral and towards the sense of some shadowy web the Fates were laying out. Progress was painfully slow, and with every step my fears multiplied.

  


A few hundred yards further on, at the brow of the hill, we found the Strofzins, similarly stranded. Uncle Christian and Aunt Magdalena cowered behind the footmen, with most of the girls hiding behind them, but Theresa was already half-way out, eager for news. When she saw us she bounded down, to the great detriment of her skirts.

'I'm going with the Tarlenheims!' she called. 'I'm not missing this for anything!'

'But sweetheart, it's not safe!' the Count shouted desperately.

'Don't be ridiculous, Papa,' she returned. 'Why, here are Heinrich, Leopold and Karl.'

It was my arm she took, though, and she murmured, 'Have you heard?'

I nodded.

'The worst of it is, I can think of nothing that might help. I can't even think what she might be doing. After all you've done, to feel so helpless!'

'She may simply be trying to flee,' I suggested, though my heart told me otherwise.

'Today, of all days? No, Elsa, the Hentzaus are trouble, and this one means to make more.'

Suddenly there was a space in the crowd, and my family were pressing ahead. Theresa and I hurried after them, still drawn by that sense of urgency, of great and terrible events in the making while we struggled on against a tide of humanity. The noise was appalling, the guards' cornets and the police whistles piercing the crowd's chatter and clamour, and the clanging of the cathedral bells.

And then, above it all, a cry. 'There! There on the bridge!'

Theresa caught my hand. Together we ran towards the Western Gate. We pushed our way forward and onto the Königstrasse, through the gate and as near the river as we could manage. The great bridge was as packed as the rest of the city, with well-wishers travelling in from the country round about, but there on the parapet a figure crouched, dressed in black, and even at that distance I knew her.

'Hentzau!' Leopold breathed.

It seemed as if all Strelsau were silent.

Behind me, I heard Karl gasp. 'On the wall!'

'Elsa, don't look!' Theresa cried.

But I could not help it. I looked back. And so I saw the solitary guard who stood there, high on the city wall. I saw him raise his rifle to his shoulder.

And I looked one last time at Maria, and I heard the shot.

And she fell, fell backwards into the swirling waters of the Elbe – but I am almost ready to swear that she fell a moment before the gun flashed and the shot broke the silence.

And they never found her, you know, alive or dead, and I have often thought that even Faithful Janetta could not keep Maria constant for long, at that.


End file.
